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

150 Confronting Imagesis in question? Everything lies here. Aristotle had indeed warned, atthe beginning of his Poetics, that the essential meaning of imitationand resemblance can vary in accordance with changes in means, objects,and modes 24 —but we are frequently tempted (and more than eversince Vasari) to fold all resemblance into the model of the mimeticdrawing of the Renaissance (or rather, into the model of our post-Vasari idea of drawing and of the Renaissance). It bears repeating thatthe dream-work offers itself as a work of resemblance that has little todo with a zeichnerische Komposition, a graphic composition, a Vasariandisegno. Resemblance works in the dream—even before showing itself,like wood before it splits—in accordance with an efficacy, Freudwarns us from the outset, that operates ‘‘in multifarious ways’’ (mitmannigfachen Mitteln). 25 Thus the resemblances offer simultaneously‘‘the first foundations for the construction of a dream’’ and the mostsingular ramifications to which each element of the dream is susceptible,for ‘‘no inconsiderable part of the dream-work consists in creatingfresh parallels where those which are already present cannot find theirway into the dream owing to the censorship imposed by resistance.’’ 26Good sense told us that an act of resembling consisted in exhibitingthe ideal and formal unity of two objects, two persons, or two separatedmaterial substrata; the dream-work, by contrast, provides Freudwith an occasion to insist on the vector of contact, material and notformal (Berührung), that generates processes or paths of resemblancein dream imagery. 27 To resemble no longer means, then, a settledstate but a process, an active figuration that, little by little or all of asudden, makes two elements touch that previously were separated(or separated according to the order of discourse). Resemblance ishenceforth no longer an intelligible characteristic, but a mute movementthat propagates itself and invents sovereign contact like an infection,a collision, or even a fire. Good sense also told us, on the otherhand, that the act of resembling presupposed that there were two: twoseparate subjects between which the resemblance will construct anideal juncture, like the delicate span of a bridge suspended betweentwo mountains; the dream-work demonstrates to us, by contrast, thatresemblance here can take leaps, make knots or conglomerations; thatit knows how to destroy delicate dualities and ruin all possibility of