Curiosities of Sigmund Freud

Marcel Proust wrote some of the most beautiful, and probably the last, pages about the me-
mory of the twentieth century. However, their present problem is that the Recherche has thou-
sands of pages. For such fast and not too refined readers as we are, what remains from that
book approximately corresponds to a biscuit, the madeleine, or to the slightly lower stone in
the courtyard of the Guermantes Palace. Memory (remembrance) is for Proust always involun-
tary; however, a slight slip on a pavement stone is enough to turn the recent events in a happy
vision. Many wrote about Proust’s “theatre of memory” (or, to be trustful to the period in que-
stion, we should call it “cinema of memory”). We find convenient, also due to this situation,
quote a conditional “conclusion” by Marc Augè: “If it was not for this last effort to legitimate
his own work, founding it on what men share (the idea of Time), and at the same time on what
individualizes them (the perception of duration), Proust would have added, at the end of his ver-
tiginous research on the renovation of the soul and on the faithfulness of the body, on cruelty
of imagination and the benefit of oblivion, to the intuition, sometimes dramatic and others reas-
1
suring of pagan cultures: society is nothing, but is the only thing that exists” .
Perhaps also the same definition of memory for the pagan cultures, is nothing but is everything
that exists. Proust’s intuition on “involuntary memory” sets us free from all these periodical and
morphologically different “crisis of memory” that have for centuries chased each others in occi-
dental culture (from the moment in which memory stops being permanent and a locatable as
a technique and as a theatre).
2
For the forever-distant Greek and Roman world, memory, other than a divinity , was also some-
thing connected to darkness, to the uncertain border between sleep, dream and awakening.
The telltale figures were not objects or biscuits but shadows. Moreover, the scene of memory
had a double prospective: a remembered past and, at the same time, a future in which the
action will take place.
Jean Starobinsky clearly demonstrates this function of memory in a memorable essay pub-
lished in 2004, Mémoire de Troie3.
nd th
A great part of the essay is dedicated to Virgil’s Aeneid and particularly to the 2 and 6 books.
On the second book Aeneas is asked by the Queen Dido to tell the painful events of the fall of
Troy and his escape. It is interesting to note how both the request and the narration take place
during the evening, a moment in which one should abandon himself to sleep4.
Aeneas’ memory starts with a “terrible nocturne”. Aeneas has just fell asleep when he starts
dreaming with Hector’s shadow, that orders him to run away with his dear ones in the quest
for the big walls, after crossing the sea. Starobinski points out how “four verses later those big
walls designate those of Troy, that are about to fall, and those of the city they need to rebuild”.
Aeneas’ sleep is suddenly interrupted and from the dream scene we pass to the vigil and to
Troy’s devastation. Before escaping, Aeneas will be saved thanks to the encounter with two
ghosts: the first one is his all-bright mother Venus; the second is gloom, his wife Creusa, who
had just disappeared. Venus fades away from Aeneias’ eyes that opacity and mist, that unfo-
cused vision that is typical of the mortal’s gaze, revealing how the final battle of Troy is not only
a human deed but also fought by the gods5.
The encounter with the Creusa’s shadow (twice “shadow”: infelix simulacrum at umbra),
enhances Hector’s dream with a prophetic supplement, a frozen future from a precise address
and a new function: Hesperia, a kingdom and a new regal wife.
In Aeneas’ story, remembering coexists with future. “This double prospective becomes clear-
er when Aeneas, descending to hell in book VI, meets some figures from the past – his father
Anchises, Dido who committed suicide – and the souls who get ready to go back to life, future
living beings, heroes that will sacrifice themselves [...] the Trojan ancestors and the Roman
descendants inhabit the same woods. Virgil shows himself as the poet who knows how past
and future are intertwined.”
These images of gloom, mist, obscurity, of a veiled vision (that prevents us from seeing, from
properly observing reality), together with memory, return in contemporary artistic experiences
without Virgil’s double perspective. The promise of future was removed from what historically
(from the 900 onwards) was defined as an “absolute present”6.
Alain Resnais’ film-documentary Nuit et bruillage (1955), summarizes in a historical sense the
possible function of memory after Holocaust (together with Adorno’s possibility of art after
Auschwitz).
Resnais’ documentary, almost entirely in black and white, was shot using archive material and
the director complained about not having the possibility of having free and total access to the
archive. The title of the film recalls the name of the terrible operation of extermination of the
Jews projected and operated by the Nazis, Nacht und Nebel. Due to its “anti-monumental”
character, the film was (and still is) a real shock, probably the only one in our century that recalls
the extreme horror and the unutterable.
However, inside the colloquial practice of art (that, therefore, has a non censured access to
archive material), we can look upon Joseph Beuys’s first display-cabinet, the only that has a
title: Auschwitz Demonstration (1964). Inside this museum-like container, the German artist
assembled and archived, besides the photographic catalogue of the architecture of the camp,
an omnium-gatherum amongst which we find a dead mouse and objects made out of the
remains of a sausage.
This “toy”, as Beuys calls it, expresses the artist’s will to rebuild a historical memory. Such a
reconstruction, under the surrealist model, manifests itself through a similar technique to
mosaic: only that in this case, the whole image is dark and refuses to become a closed histo-
ry (what may seen as unwise, in front of what cannot be explained).

Woody Allen’s film Shadows and Fog (1991) has another kind of obscurity. It is a brilliant black

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comedy (dark), a pastiche of genders and quotes that range from M – The Monster of
Dusseldorf by Fritz Lang, to Kafka’s Process interpreted by Orson Welles, to Bertolt Brecht,
Ingmar Bergman, and even Prosperous, in Shakespeare’s Tempest.7
The film is set in the 20’s, in a foggy European town. The main character is an employee,
Kleinman that during one evening sees himself involved in the search for a strangler. At the end
of the movie after several events that dealt with life; love; power; sex and guilty collective con-
science, Kleinman, with the help of the magician and his magic mirror, manages to erase the
strangler (who, in reality, is not captured from the enraged croud). Filmed in black and white,
with camera movements in soggettiva, to enhance loneliness and fear, the movie sees to over-
turn symmetrically the concept of reality of the Antique World. In fact, if Aeneas needed Venus’
intervention to get out of the mist and finally see a real scene (with the gods), Kleinman on the
opposite, uses fog and the illusion of the mirror to tell things as they are. Shadow, mist and
spectre (with an overturn, regarding the past, similar to the “noon-spectres”, such as Jensen’s
Gradiva interpreted by Freud), also show up in Gerhard Richter’s work. In his great work in
progress, Atlas, blurred images and ghosts have a considerable part8.
Atlas is a large collection of photographs, collages and sketches, ordered in panels that Gerhard
Richter started in 19629.
The first four panels display 113 photographs; they are small photographs on yellowed paper
that come from the family and personal atmosphere of the German artist. The beginning of
Atlas proposes itself as an archive, or as an inventory of biographical visual materials of which
the author gives no information.
The artist’s intention is quite ambiguous even if clear: the pictures of the family album, even if
they have an old aspect, reveal the fetishist character of the mnemonic image. The lack of titles
or any other information (or of any order) turns this mnemonic image into a “lost object” for its
viewer.
Benjamin Buchloh, in his widely published essay Atlas and the Anomic Archive10 wisely reveals
how XX century art and society possess different kinds of memory crisis.
One of the first symptoms of this crisis is photography, especially that of popular of mass cul-
ture.
“Richter’s Atlas seems to consider photography and its various practices as a system of ideo-
logical domination and more precisely as one of the instruments with which collective anomie,
amnesia and repression are socially inscribed.”11
Probably Buchloh is suffering a bit too much from Émile Durkheim’s sociological theories and
from both guilt, or absence of rules of society. If we rather believe in the artist’s words (Marcel
Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg and even Richter himself), we are able to observe how this
memory crisis was an intentional act, deliberated and even mechanical. The starting point, on
the XX century, is the lack of meaning of the artistic subject. “For example, if I draw an object
from real, I start stylising it and changing it according my personal taste and formation. If I paint
it from photography, I manage to forget everything12.
This tendency to oblivion and to the loss of the subject seems to be both individual (a certain
disposition of the artist, as it could have been once said) or objective, in the way the observer
tries to unveil that sort of mute archive.
From the fifth panel onwards, Richter combines personal photos with others taken from news-
papers and magazines. Furthermore, some of these images will form a “base” for the paint-
ings taken from photographs that he does from 1962 to 1966.
Until 2006, Atlas has the appearance of a monument to memory13, a memory without any name
or title, other than (in a small part) the references to the painterly works of the artist.
The apparently random use of photographs taken from newspapers and magazines (such as

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those recently taken from internet, as for example, Thomas Hirschhorn in his horror scenes)
establishes a double implication. On one side, it confronts with what Buchloh called the “bana-
lity of everyday life”. On the other, it refers to an essentially technical field, that of the artistic
technique. An artistic technique that usually comes from Picasso and the cubists: the collage.
In synthesis, the proliferation of the photographic images in newspapers and magazines and,
nowadays, through television and Internet, represent an excess of information14. On the con-
trary, in this case even the word information is not enough to describe a situation in which it is
its definition and, especially, the function of the image to be questioned. In 1938, Martin
Heidegger wrote an essay called The Age of the World Picture in which he stated: “The funda-
mental event of modernity is the conquest of the world as picture. From now on the word ‘pic-
ture’’ means: the collective image of representing production”15.
What Heidegger intended to say, in a quite explicit way, was that if we passed from depicting
the world (as, for example, the old Atlas did) to “the world conceived as an image”. We no
longer observe the modern world, and even more the contemporary one, through a theoretical
window (a depiction); what we see is in reality a banal and ordinary reality, a world “that has
become an image”. The other aspect, that which regards the artistic technique of collage, only
apparently has a secondary character. From the point of view of the artistic experience, the col-
lage (as a production of a representation), presents itself as an attempt to splinter, to recom-
bine and, in a certain way, to dissolve authority, the power of the image as the world.
According to this, it seems the case to decipher Richter’s “absence of meaning by the subject”,
also expressed by many artists before him. Even more poignant to this aspect, is to notice that
his Atlas is mute, lacking any explanatory names or titles (we could lightly define this artistic
process as a homeopathic treatment).
Atlas, as well as other encyclopaedic and archival sciences16, is a sort of virus that attacks (or
attempts to do so), the historical memory, ruled by national regulations and laws, what has
been defined as “the memory police”.17
Several contemporary artists have applied their own experiences and methods inspired in
ethnography and anthropology (in a non-subjective way) to reformulate a different “power of
memory”.
The stylistic model, “their antiquity”, goes back to the process of “free association”, developed
by the Surrealists in the specific context of the objects of the 19th century. This early Freudian
practice (that goes back to Traumdeutung of the early 1900’s) was replaced by the assemblage
technique and to a constant attention given to the nuances of critique and institutions, certain
“archaeology of knowledge” (and obviously of seeing).
The character of the artist-archaeologist or ethnologist, can be embodied by Mark Dion, who
recovering a recent tradition of critique of the system of the institutions (from Marcel
Broodthaers, to Robert Smithson’s “place-non-place”), creates sculptures and installations that
work like collections of archaeological finds according to the conventions of a natural history
museum.
Susan Hiller is among the contemporary artists that who has been using the instruments of eth-
nology and anthropology with more assiduity and perspicacity. She’s been using with a huge
precision and with her relevant visionary capacity, essentially pictorial (even if her works the
also uses non-pictorial means). Without inviting us to a bar or to an exotic meal (such is the rela-
tional trend), Susan Hiller seems to have appropriated the motto of the pagan cultures: society
is nothing but it’s the only thing that exists.
We simply need to remember some of her work titles: The Last Silent Movie (presented dur-
ing the last Berlin Biennial, 2007); Psychic Archaeology (2005); Unheimlich (1998); or Dream
Mapping (1974), to notice a coherent archaeological research. Michel Foucault would have
called it a “history of limits”, of those experiences that although located on the bothers of the

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historical present, constitute the ground in which history is rooted.
To put in concisely, the American artist who has been living in London for the last thirty years,
dedicates herself to anthropology; forgotten languages; dreams; folk fantasies; remains from
the past; lost thoughts and images and, in sum, of the dear old triad love (sex), life and death,
which our society is based.
Hiller’s favourite disguise is that of an archaeologist; a special one, for she uses her findings –
that she turns into works of art – not as a philologist or an “antiquarian”, but as a “genealo-
gist”. As Michel Foucault wrote (interpreting Friedrich Nietzsche’s second Untimely
Meditation), “the purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our
identity but to commit itself to its dissipation”18.
In 1994 Susan Hiller installed a work at the Freud Museum, in London, in Freud’s bedroom du-
ring his last years. In the beginning the work consisted of 23 elements, each other displayed in
an individual box, similar to the ones used by archaeologists. During the following years, the
work From the Freud Museum had the addition of other elements, in a total of 50; each has its
own title and a descriptive text, all of them showcased in big cabinets.
From the Freud Museum is literally inspired in Freud and his theories, but also, and above all,
in that house in London, that became the museum of the founder of psychoanalysis. The con-
tainers of an archaeologist and the way the findings are displayed in showcases are a perfect
copy of museum’s practice. This activity of doubling the museologic structures is not rare in
contemporary artistic practices (as well as a displacement of studios).
However, Hiller follows a genealogic path: this representation, and this display where inspired
in Freud’s last house, which was a sort of museum (Freud loved to collect archaeological
objects, a sort of psychoanalytic antique) and that, after his death, this room became a muse-
um (conventionally as the place where we conserve traces from history).
The collection (obviously connected with the act of “collecting”) is the main theme of this
work. The findings, the 50 elements that shaped the work during time, are partially inspired in
Freud and also, and mainly, they are based in old and new works of the artist, or of her free
associations).
From the Freud Museum is a perfect simulacrum, both of the Freud museum but also as in
“screen memories”, Hiller accepts that the original element belongs to oblivion, to what leaves
no memory of itself other than through doubles, camouflages, or traces of memories.
In other words, and even if everything seems to say the opposite, it is not Freud and not even
his collection that Hiller’s work “talks about”. Several contemporary artists – even in more
apparently structured versions, more synthetic and documented – use oblivion, erasure and
fragmentation (an intentional loss) in painterly language19.
The materials and sediments of what has just happened are therefore catalogued (not a gener-
al inventory) to allow a lost and excluded history.
Another work by Susan Hiller talks about fetishism, of memory and oblivion and of unfocused
simulacra; motives and images are connected through the language of painting (even if we are
not mentioning paintings but of photographic “enlargements”). We are talking about the work
that named this chapter, The Curiosities of Sigmund Freud (9 Iris glacee prints, 50.8 x 76.2 cm
each, 2005).
Eight of these images come from a collection of glass slides, called miniature curiosities for the
microscope, that belong to the Freud family. The artist enlarged these “miniatures”, adding a
certain colour. The enlarged images are not interconnected but with a vague and spectral
Victorian memory (as documented by its titles, as, for example, Jubilee Group of the Royal
Family or The £1000 Bank of England Note). They don’t give us elements for a complete inter-
pretation. The 9th image suggests the sense of this specific interpretation. It consists of the
enlargement of a suggestive fragment of a letter written by Freud to his girlfriend. It creates a

112
wonderful surface effect: “Here the pen fell out of my hand and inscribed these secret signs.
I beg you forgiveness and ask you not to trouble yourself with an interpretation” (8 August 1882
letter to Martha Bernays).
In this work, Susan Hiller seems to ask us to don’t worry too much in interpreting but to
observe the “secret signs” and the spectral images20.
In a certain sense, the artist brings back to life the figure of the detective from the crime novel
of the early 1900’s, as analyzed by Siegfried Kracauer21.
The hidden secret, discovered by the detective, belongs to a purely formal world, in which the
“fragmentary” individuals move “on the tracks of law” and always inside a rational system,
written and governed by pure equity”22. Hiller turns the rational “psychological microscope”
into an illegal experiment (a parody of the practices of Conceptual Art) and, above all, inserting
archaeological practice in a discontinuous and dispersive strand. To quote our highly referenced
Foucault, her images “constitute the ground in which history is rooted”. She develops a me-
mory, and an archival assemblage whose scope is to give an objective possibility to forgotten
histories, to lost languages and even to simulacrum and ghosts. Susan Hiller, like György
Lukács, thinks that our “age is full of meaning”23.
“Here we have a man whose job is to pick up the day’s rubbish in the capital. He collects and
catalogues everything that the great city has cast off, everything it has lost, and discarded, and
broken. He goes through the archives of debauchery and the confused array of refuse. He
makes a selection, an intelligent choice; like a miser hoarding treasure, he collects the garbage
that will become objects of utility or pleasure when refurbished by Industrial magic” Charles
Baudelaire, Artificial Paradise.

1
Marc Augé, Génie du paganisme, Paris 1982; translated italian Genio del paganesimo, Torino
2008, p. 201.
2
Jean-Pierre Vernant’s essay Mythic Aspects of Memory and Time, published in 1959 in the
“Journal de Psychologie” and afterwards in his book Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs.
Etudes de psychologie historique (1965); English translation Myth and Society in Ancient
Greece, England 1990. (Italian translation, Mito e pensiero presso i Greci, Torino 1978, pp. 93-
124.) About the distinction, from Plato onwards, between mneme and anamnesis, check
Jacques Derrida’s analysis in his “archive fever”.
3
“Critique”, no. 687-688, Paris 2004; translated in English by Richard Pevear, The Hudson
Review, Vol. LIX, No. 1 (Spring 2006). The following sentences are taken from Starobinski’s
text.
4
“Et iam nox umida caelo praecipitat suadentque cadentia sidera somnos”, Aeneid II, 8-9.
Virgil is a insuperable master in repeating some elements such as the evening, obscurity and
shadow in different circumstances and nuances. This happens both in the whole poem as
well as in single verses, as it happens in the musical “Ibant oscuri sola sub nocte per
umbram” of book VI [ r i p e t e rei de ll’E neid e]. This technique can be compared with the con-
centric circles caused by a stone thrown into a pond. To attest the influence of ‘Virgil’s noc-
turne” in Freud we can simply remember the quote, take from Aeneid, book VI, and insert-
ed in the beginning of Traumdeutung: Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronte movebo.
5
“Aspice (namque omnem, quae nunc obducta tuenti/mortalis hebetat visus tibi et umida cir-
cum caligat, nubem eripiam...” [ r i p e t e r ei dell’Eneide] II, 604-606. This “auspice” is essen-

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tially a phenomenological imperative: adspicere means to observe, see, examine, consider,
but above all to face someone, too look to, being different from the unspecific videre or from
perceiving only with the mind, cernere. “Gaze, in fact, I will dissipate all the clouds that now
veil your gaze (obstructing or covering) the mortal view and around the humid fog.”
6
Jacques Derrida focused on ghosts, specters, archives, and in general on the etiology of
delirium in a conference held in London in 1994 and re-edited the following year with the title
Mal d’archive, une impression freudienne, Paris. The book is a development of the chapter
“Freud and the Scene of Writing” published in L’ecriture et la differénce, Paris 1967.
Archive Fever is a fundamental book for the recent Archival Sciences. In what concerns this
text, it is interesting to analyse the changing of perspective in Derrida’s texts. In 1967 the
analysis of memory and of the perceptive apparatus was partly founded on Freud’s notes
from 1925, regarding the Wunderblock, the Mystic Writing Pad. In an essay from 1995, the
archive (whose “structure is spectral”), the act of archiving, and memory should interact with
machines and contemporary technologic games. As D. Draisma states in his book Metaphors
of Memory, op. cit., metaphors and frenzies of memory rewrite on time the definition and
function of memory. This rewriting is also always a matter of technique and of technology.
7
The final sentence of the circus magician: “people need them [their illusions] like they need
the air!” echoes Shakespeare’s famous “we are such stuff as dreams are made on...”. But
also the complex and concentric image of Virgil in which Creusa’s shadow “dispersed
between her hands, equal to the light winds, similar to a winged dream” Aeneas II, 793-794.
8
In what is related to the Holocaust, the images of the concentration camps are part of the
Atlas, together with pictures from books from 1967, but there is no correspondence with
painterly works. They are silent and mute ghosts.
About the relation between the archive and images, “despite everything” of Auschwitz, Cfr.
Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, Paris (2003), Italian translation Immagini mal-
grado tutto, Milan, 2005, chapter “Immagine-archivio o immagine apparenza” pp. 117-151.
9
The most recent version of Atlas is edited by Helmut Friedel, Walter Koenig, Koln, 2006. To
have some more “informatin” about the Atlas, Cf. the beautiful introductory essay to the
book by Helmut Friedel: Gerhard Richer, Atlas. Photographs, Collages and Sketches 1962-
2006, pp. 5-17.
10
From the edition Photography and painting in the work of Gerhard Richter. Four essays on
Atlas, Barcelona 2000, pp. 11-30.
11
B. Buchloh, op. cit., p. 23.
12
Gerhard Richter, in an interview from 1972; in The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and
Interviews, 1962-1993. By Gerhard Richter, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, David Britt, MIT Press, 1995.
13
B. Buchloh, op. cit., p. 27: “Memory us thus conceived of in Richter’s Atlas first of all as an
archeology of pictorial and photographic registers, each of which partakes in a different pho-
tographic formation, and each of which generates its proper psychic register of responses”.
14
Siegfried Kracauer’s observations about photograph and memory seem to have come back
to life: “If photography offered itself as a background for memory, it should be memory itself
to operate the selection; on the contrary, the tide of photographs washes away the dykes of
memory. The attack made by these images is so violent that it threatens to destroy the
purest conscience of the essential features. Works of art face the same destiny, if they are
reproduced [...] in the illustrated magazines the public sees the world, but it is those same
magazines that prevent them from understanding it”. In Das Ornament der Masse (1927),
trans. Eng. The mass ornament: Weimar Essays, Harvard University Press, 1995. Kracauer’s
journalistic remarks are close to Benjamin’s reflection about the aura, proposed in The work
of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. However, it seems to be, in its “surface effect”
– as Foucault would call it – still more surprising and incisive. If we bare in mind that other
element suggested by Kracauer, according to which, from the point of view of the images of
memory “photograph appears as a pastiche that is partially composed by refuses”. Benjamin
defined Kracauer as a chiffonnier, as a ragman, in a positive sense. “It is, in fact, the ragman
who saves refuses, the remains of modernity, from oblivion.” David Frisby, Fragments of
Modernity. Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin, Oxford
195. Even if using disparate approaches, artists such as Robert Rauschenber, Gordon Matta-
Clark, Mike Kelley and Susan Hiller can be seen as chiffonniers.
15
Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (1950), English translation Off the Beaten Track, Cambridge,

114
2002, p. 71.
16
Among which the collage has a relevant position. Collage as a palimpsest that technologi-
cally corresponds to Freud’s “Mystic Writing Pad” during the first decades of the 20th centu-
ry and nowadays to Internet. This “evolution of the Mystic Writing Pad” denotes a relevant
changing in this metaphor of memory. From a box with a “printable” wax bottom, the magic
board lost, during the years, its residual matter, its traces engraved in the wax, to give way
to the absences of the aluminum powder and even more to its total erasure in the comput-
er screen.
The first position of the “Top 2004” from a toys website was occupied by the “magic board”,
described as “a game that brings you back to childhood: the magic board with two knobs to
control the pen and write in the aluminum powder. Then you just have to shake it and the
board is back as new. An online version, in Flash, will bring you back to the past. Use the
arrows and the mouse to write”.
17
In an article from “The Guardian” (16-10-2008), “The freedom of historical debate is under
attack by the memory police”, Timothy Garton Ash reformulates the appeal that appeared a
week before in “Le Monde”, entitled “Appel de Blois” (the first signatories include histori-
ans such as Eric Hobsbawm, Jacques Le Goff and Heinrich August Winkler), arguing against
the accumulation of so-called “memory laws”. This is an aberrant institutional deformation
that states that “more and more countries have laws saying you must remember and
describe this or that historical event in a certain way, sometimes on pain of criminal prosecu-
tion if you give the wrong answer. What the wrong answer is depends on where you are. [...]
It’s no accident that this appeal originated in France, which has the most intense and tortu-
ous recent experience with memory laws and prosecutions. It began uncontroversially in
1990, when denial of the Nazi Holocaust of the European Jews, along with other crimes
against humanity defined by the 1945 Nuremberg tribunal, was made punishable by law in
France - as it is in several other European countries”. The appeal ends up with an appeal: “So
join us, please, to see off the nanny state and its memory police”.
18
Cfr. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, Paris 1971, English translation in
Language, Counter Memory, Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 162.
19
It should be added what was defined as “postindustrial obsoleteness”. Observe the defi-
nition of “Arte Povera” in the book by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin
H.D. Buchloh, Art since 1900. Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, London 2004:
20
Miniaturization and enlarging are as “spectral” as Derrida’s archive.
21
Der Detective-Roman. Ein philosophische Traktat (1925). Italian translation, Il romanzo
poliziesco, Roma 1984.
22
Siegfried Kracauer, idem, p. 32.
23
While exploring this area of dispersion and oblivion, Freudian rhetoric becomes, also
metaphorically, an essential instrument: a discursive way to rediscover the shock of memo-
ry.
24
As stated at the end of note 14, the chiffonnier is that weird archaeological profession, that
specific figure that, according to certain enunciates (either psychological, narrative or anthro-
pological), can be incarnated by such artists as Rauschenger; Matta-Clark; Kippenberger;
Pistoletto; Kelly; McCarthy; Hiller or, more recently, Jeremy Deller and Christophe Bücher.
Being so, Baudelaire’s image is still actual today, with the exception of the Industry’s “faded
muslin”.

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