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

146 Confronting Imagesvisual model that cannot be accounted for either by the classic notionof disegno, with its mimetic transparency, or by that of the imagemonogram(Kant’s schema), with its synthetic homogeneity. Freud’sexample, moreover, presents itself less as an example of a closed object,the result of a work, than as a paradigm of the work itself. Itopens, in effect, the chapter in The Interpretation of Dreams devoted to‘‘the dream-work’’ (Traumarbeit). It therefore provides the structuralparadigm of a functioning—a very strange functioning in which therend, after having breached the too-stable, idealist entities of a drawingor schema, will invest* the very idea of function as Cassirer couldunderstand it after Kant. 11A function that is rent—that includes the power of the negativewithin it—presides, then, as work, over the intense or evanescent visualityof dream images. How are we to understand such work? Evenbeyond the metaphor proposed in the paradigm of the rebus, Freudwarns us against making ‘‘a plastic representation (plastische Vorstellung)of the psychical conditions during the dream-formation.’’ 12 If atopography of some kind is at work in dream-formation—and in unconsciousprocesses generally—it cannot be folded into either the empiricismof our sensible space, in other words that of our ‘‘livedspace,’’ or into the Kantian idea of an a priori, of an ideal categoryissuing from some transcendental aesthetic. 13 The problem can be envisagedonly on the basis of what, more modestly, presents itself—andit is not by chance that Freud begins to problematize the notion ofthe dream-work by insisting on the so often fragmentary presentationof dreams, on their character as shreds put together.† What presentsitself crudely at first, what presents itself and refuses the idea, is therend. It is an outside-subject image, an image that is all dream-image.It will impose itself here only by dint of the omission (Auslassung) orretrenchment of which it is, strictly speaking, the vestige: the sole survival,simultaneously a sovereign remainder and the trace of an erasure.A visual agent of disappearance. Which makes it possible forFreud to conclude in stride that a dream is no more a translation*investira, which can also mean ‘‘will besiege.’’†lambeaux mis ensemble.