Archival Bodies

This essay considers specific moments in a history of representation of the body, in which the body figures as an archive of data, functioning either as the visible register of character and pathology or as a storehouse of unconscious meanings and the grounding of subjectivity. It begins with Lavater's Physiognomy at the end of the eighteenth century and goes on to examine the impact of the rise of photography in the nineteenth century, with particular attention to the photography of hysteria in the Salpêtrière. The study concludes with an assessment of Freud's contribution to Studies in Hysteria that highlights the significance of a shift from visual to narrative representation, in which the symptomatic body of the hysteric figures as an archive of unconscious meanings. Freud's analysis of his own symptomatic forgetting in the Signorelli parapraxis serves to indicate, however indirectly, the register of bodily experience in the realm of fantasy.