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

152 Confronting Imagesment (Verschiebung) in regard to the common element has been madein order, as it were, to facilitate its figuration.’’ 29 What does this imply?That mimetic sameness is constantly ruined by the work of displacement,to the same extent that the duality of the poles of resemblanceis constantly ruined by the work of condensation. So resemblance nolonger exhibits the Same, but is infected with alterity, whereas theresembling terms bang together in a chaos—the ‘‘Mischbildung’’—thatrenders impossible their actual recognition as terms. So there are nolonger any worthwhile ‘‘terms,’’ only knotted relations, transitionsthat crystallize. Now this kind of altered compression of resemblancehas a decisive implication for our topic, which is the implacable interweavingof formation into distortion.* When Freud insists on the notrealismof composite images, and on the fact that they no longercorrespond at all to our habitual objects of visible perception—despite, or rather because of their specific visual intensity—he steersus toward a notion of resemblance that will accept as its ultimateconsequence ‘‘reversal, or turning a thing into its opposite [die Umkehrung,Verwandlung ins Gegenteil].’’ 30Thus the ‘‘processes of dream-figuration’’—for such is the subheadingunder which Freud introduced us to all these paradoxes†—manage to split, along with resemblance, what we usually understandby ‘‘figurative representation.’’ The dream makes use of resemblanceonly to produce ‘‘a mass of distortion [ein Mass von Enstellung] in thematerial which is to be represented, and this has a positively paralyzingeffect, to begin with, on any attempt at understanding thedream.’’ 31 Here’s what seems to distance, definitively, the figurabilityoperative in the dream-work—which every night pursues us alone—from the cultural world of painted and sculpted figurations—whichevery Sunday we go to admire, en famille, on the walls of some artmuseum . . . But all this is not as simple or clear-cut as it mightseem, and Freud would not stop there. Some thirty pages after havinginvoked, against the metaphor of disegno, that of the rebus, he returns,oddly, to the same visual-arts paradigm. But why do this? To elaborate*l’entrelacement indéfectible de la ‘‘formation dans la déformation.’’†SE and Crick: ‘‘The Means of Representation.’’ German: Die Darstellungensmittel desTraums.