georges didi huberman, confronti... - lensbased.net

144 Confronting Imagesof replacing the tyranny of a thesis with that of its antithesis. It’s amatter only of proceeding dialectically: of thinking the thesis with itsantithesis, the architecture with its flaws, the rule with its transgression,the discourse with its slips of the tongue, the function with itsdysfunction (beyond Cassirer, then), and the fabric with its rend . . .To think the fabric (the fabric of representation) with its rend, to thinkthe function (the symbolic function) with its interruption or its constitutionaldysfunction: as it happens, this had been taken on almostforty years before Panofsky’s iconology, and more than twenty yearsbefore Cassirer’s ‘‘symbolic forms.’’ This had been courageouslybegun by a thinker and a practitioner, a man very attentive to thephenomenology of a visible of which he was nonetheless wary, ascientist extraordinarily quick to question the certainties of the veryscience that he practiced, an individual who, with rare resolve, pursuedthe dangerous adventure of grounding a nonspecular knowledge,a knowledge capable of thinking the work of not-knowledge withinhim. That individual was Freud. Remember that his great book TheInterpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, is devoted to the anadyomenemovement of a plunge into the nether regions that produces thesurge of nocturnal images. 7 Remember that after being confronted bythe all too visible enigma of hysterical symptoms, he set off on thedisquieting and unstable road of dreams as on a ‘‘royal road to knowledge(Kenntnis, and not Wissenschaft) of the unconscious.’’ 8 Rememberthat the road in question would take him to a more decisive and newunderstanding of the notion of symptom. A decisive and new way ofseeing: which is why we must come to a halt here when the imagecatches us in the play of not-knowledge.It is with the dream and the symptom that Freud smashed the boxof representation. And with them that he opened, which is to say rentand liberated, the notion of image. Far from comparing the dreamwith a painting or a figurative drawing, he insisted on its value asdistortion (Enstellung) and on the play of logical ruptures by which the‘‘spectacle’’ of the dream is often breached, as by a perforating rain.The metaphor of the rebus often comes up in his writing so as to