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

Image as Rend 145liberate, from the outset, our understanding of the dream from allfigurative bias—a famous passage:Suppose I have a picture-puzzle [Bilderrätsel], a rebus, in frontof me. It depicts a house with a boat on its roof, a singleletter of the alphabet, the figure of a running man whosehead has been conjured away, and so on. Now I might bemisled into raising objections and declaring that the pictureas a whole and its component parts are nonsensical [unsinnig].A boat has no business being on the roof of a house,and a headless man cannot run. 9 Moreover, the man is biggerthan the house; and if the whole picture is intended to representa landscape, letters of the alphabet are out of place in itsince such objects do not occur in nature. But obviously wecan only form a proper judgment of the rebus if we put asidecriticisms such as these of the whole composition and itsparts and if, instead, we try to replace each separate imageby a syllable or word that can be presented by that image[durch das Bild darstellbar ist—and not vorstellbar ist] in someway or other. The words which are put together in this wayare no longer nonsensical but may form a poetical phrase ofthe greatest beauty and significance. A dream is a picturepuzzleof this sort and our predecessors in the field of dreaminterpretationhave made the mistake of treating the rebusas a graphic composition [zeichnerische Komposition]. 10We are here at the beginning of a movement that will never stopdeepening and radicalizing its blow against, its rend through the classicconcept of representation: something, right there, presents itselfvisually, but it is not a drawing—rather a paradoxical organizationthat throws off track both the meaning of the discourse that we expectedto read in it (this is the unsinnig in our passage) and the representationaltransparency of the elements figured the one with theother (this is the Bilderrätsel, inexplicable to anyone who looks at it asa mimetic work of art). From the outset, then, Freud proposed a