deleting babiński
Valerie Schmidt's work “Deleting Babiński” can be understood as an intervention in the pictorial dispositif that Georges Didi-Huberman describes in “Invention de l'hystérie” as the creation of a tableau clinique: an orchestrated arrangement in which the female body is not simply viewed, but transformed into a symptôme visuel through the mechanisms of seeing. André Brouillet's painting „Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière“ (1887) serves as a paradigmatic document of this dispositif. It shows Charcot's theatricality in the production of truth, his staging of hysteria as an image that is less diagnosed than performatively produced. The patient Blanche (Marie Wittman) appears in it as the embodiment of a ressemblance—not of an individual suffering, but of an aesthetically and medically produced image formula. The moment of fainting—that moment of “withdrawal” and theatrical surrender into the arms of the male doctor—is both image production and power production.deleting babiński
The eight-part photographic series dissolves this historicized visual structure by isolating the falling female figure and transforming it into a sculptural body form. The moment of transition into unconsciousness—or rather, the moment in which this transition is performatively depicted—is frozen by the photographic interruption of movement. The poses appear rigid, but they have emerged from a highly dynamic sequence; they oscillate between loss of control and choreographed gestures of collapse. In this way, the work refers to the historical visual practices of hysteria, which systematically shaped the female subject as an aesthetically prepared symptom carrier: as a body exposed to seeing, searching gazes.
The medical invention, aestheticization, and popularization of hysteria in the 19th century produced a symptomatic iconography in which women are depicted almost exclusively as suffering, powerless beings in need of rescue—always framed by male authority, expertise, and control. This pictorial tradition not only stabilized clinical power relations, but also functioned as a cultural foil that linked femininity with vulnerability, excess, and irrationality.
Schmidt's work subverts this structure by removing the male support from the picture, thereby destabilizing the epistemic foundation of historical representation. In her case, the protagonist now supports herself; the once functional male hands now appear only as obscure, almost decorative residues that can neither protect nor control. This overturns the iconographically established gesture of powerlessness: it transforms into a paradoxical pose of autonomous imbalance, a form of self-assertion in the moment of supposed loss of control.
Deleting Babiński is therefore not only a critical rereading, but also an epistemic counterpoint to Brouillet's tableau clinique. The series transforms the iconographic tradition of hysteria from a space of male authority to a place of visual instability and knowledge production. It shows that the hysterical image—the image of the body sinking to the ground, seemingly without will—is not complete, but open to new montages, new meanings, new formulas of pathos. In this sense, Schmidt works entirely in the spirit of Didi-Huberman: she does not leave the historical image to rest, but makes it tremble.
fig. 1-8, 2014, series of 8 flags, 350 x 243,5cm, Multiflag
also as an edition of Hahnemühle barita prints, 18x24cm, edition of 5 (+2AP)
