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

Image as Rend 153a homology of representations? To excavate an irrevocable difference?Nothing of the kind. Freud advances the pictorial paradigm only so asto effect a transition, paradoxically, from a rend to a disfiguration. It iseffectively from the angle of a flaw, an incapacity—an ‘‘incapacityto express’’ logical relations (diese Ausdrucksfähigkeit abgeht)—that theplastic arts are invoked here in relation to figurability in dreams; andit is not without interest to find under Freud’s pen the lapidary but soaccurate indication that ‘‘the reason for their incapacity lies in thenature of the material [in dem Material],’’ just as this ‘‘incapacity toexpress [logical relations] must lie in the nature of the psychical material[am psychischen Materiel] out of which dreams are made.’’ 32 Andthe famous passage that ensues, evoking the medieval use of phylacteries,or text-scrolls, to indicate statements made by painted figures,is included only to underscore the defective paradigm of the visual arts,the discourse or words (die Rede) that painters—Freud lets himselfimagine—‘‘despaired of representing pictorially.’’ 33Freud thus broached the question of the figurable from the angleof a constitutive rend or incapacity. But far from finding here an argumentfor ineffability or for something like a neo-Romantic philosophyof the unfigurable, immediately thereafter he moved on to the almost‘‘experimental’’ conception of a work of figuration envisaged with itsrend—its rend at work. Here we are at the exemplary and tangibleplace of a radical difference from what Cassirer would understand,some years later, by ‘‘symbolic function’’ as well as by ‘‘function’’ ingeneral. Freud effectively proposes to understand the dream’s ‘‘inabilityto express’’ in terms other than those of privation pure and simple,which means in plain language that logical relations, incapable ofbeing represented in the dream as such, will be figured just the same. . . by means of an appropriate disfiguration: ‘‘dreams can take intoaccount some of the logical relations between the dream-thoughtsby making an appropriate modification in the method of figurationcharacteristic of dreams.’’ 34So we understand that the incapacity or rend functions in dreamsas the very motor of something that will be between a desire and aconstraint—the constraining desire to figure. To figure despite everything,thus to force, thus to rend. And in this constraining movement,