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

Image as Rend 147aiming at ‘‘legibility’’ than it is a figurative drawing aiming at ‘‘visibility.’’14This is not the place to detail the many inferences, always rigorousbut always audacious, through which Freud guides us toward thismetapsychological understanding of the dream-work. It will suffice torecall how the simple phenomenology of omission in the dreamcomes to be seen as a ‘‘work of condensation’’ (Verdichtungsarbeit),and how the simple phenomenology of the dream riddle comes to beseen as another kind of ‘‘work,’’ called displacement (Verschiebungsarbeit).This makes us understand better what it is about dreams thatprohibits functional synthesis, in the strict sense of the term: ‘‘Thedream is . . . differently centered,’’ Freud tells us, and this differentlybreaches elements of meaning, objects, figures, but also intensities,values. 15 This differently never stops acting and traveling. It investseverything.* It gives a paradoxical law—a constraint, rather—that is alaw of lability, a law of not-rule. The law of the insistent exception,the law or sovereignty of that which excepts itself† in the visible as wellas in the legible and in propositional logic.That is why Freud’s analysis of the ‘‘means of presentation’’ or‘‘figuration’’ in dreams (Darstellungsmittel des Traums) will unfold as atheoretical work of opening logic as much as opening the image. It is,in effect, from the angle of ‘‘dreams hav[ing] no means at their disposalfor presenting . . . logical relations between the dream-thoughts’’that dream figuration is put into play from the outset. 16 But hereagain, the negativity that emerges from this assertion has nothing todo with the idea of a privation pure and simple. The negativity becomeswork—the work of ‘‘presentation,’’ of the Darstellung. Incapableof representing temporal relations—of signifying them, of makingthem visible and legible as such—the dream-work will make do withpresenting together, visually, elements that a representational discourse(or discursive representation) would normally have differentiatedor inferred from one another. Causal relations will yield to copresentation.17 ‡ ‘‘Frequency’’ will become multiplicity, and temporal*Il investit tout; alternatively, ‘‘It besieges everything.’’†de ce qui s’excepte.‡coprésence; SE: ‘‘collocation’’; Crick: ‘‘combinations’’; German: zuzammenstellung. (Reabbreviations, see head of endnotes.)