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

Image as Rend 149quences anticipate their causes, they are their causes—and their negationas well. ‘‘Reversal, or turning a thing into its opposite[Umkehrung, Verwandlung ins Gegenteil], is one of the means of presentationmost favored by the dream-work,’’ notes Freud, who goes sofar as to observe the same kind of work on the level of the affectsattached to dream-images. 22 Thus will the representation effectivelybe split from itself, and the affect from the representation, and theaffect from itself: as if the dream-work were driven by the paradoxicalstakes of a visuality that simultaneously imposes itself, troubles us, insists,and pursues us—precisely insofar as we do not know what aboutit troubles us, what kind of trouble is in question, and just what itmight mean . . .Even this very brief overview of Freud’s problematic makes us seehow the visual ‘‘logic’’—if the term ‘‘logic’’ still makes any sense—ofthe image here contravenes the serene certainties of a thought thatwants to express itself in the classic terms of disegno, or in those,Kantian, of the schema and the monogram. We would of course haveto track more precisely how Freud managed to account, in the dreamwork,for all the play of displacement, oriented and disoriented; howthe use of ‘‘ready-made symbols’’ is interwoven with the invention ofunprecedented symbolic values, of singular traits that it would havebeen impossible to predict; how linguistic structures are elaborated,but whose grammar and code have no law save to disappear as such;how the extraordinary exchange between verbal forms and the formsof objects is produced along chains of association; how absurditycomes therein to rhyme with calculation and close reasoning; how allthis work, all these requirements, all these selections aim at the sametime only to make the image into an agent of attraction and ‘‘regression,’’in the technical sense—a sense that is topographical, formal,and temporal—introduced by Freud. 23 We would, finally, in order tograsp fully this rend introduced into the classic notion of the image,have to take note of the disconcerting moves displayed by the dreamworkwith regard to what we usually call resemblance.For the dream draws an essential part of its visual power fromresemblance. Everything, in the dream, resembles or seems to bearthe enigmatic stamp of a resemblance. But how? What resemblance