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

154 Confronting Imagesthe rend opens the figure, in all of this verb’s many senses. It becomessomething like the very principle and energy—incited by the effectof the rending, namely the absence—of the work of figurability. Byhollowing out the representation, it calls forth the figure and its presentation(Darstellung), it triggers the infinite process of the tangentthat is a fundamental characteristic of the very notion of figure. Troposand figura have always yielded, we know, the notion of turn and detour.35 * They are detour made presentation, and when we look intothe dream’s ways of figuration, we understand better why it provespointless to try to distinguish what belongs to language from whatbelongs to the visible: for the truth is that the problem lies elsewhere,that the figure thus understood foils in its rhetorical proliferation thepure and simple legibility of a discourse, and that it foils just as much,in its power of presentation, the pure and simple visibility of a ‘‘figurative’’representation in the academic sense of the term.We will perhaps never exhaust the consequences of such a figuralplay—one whereby the rend takes a detour so that the detour comesto present itself visually. In this sense, the rend opens just as much tothe elaborative complexity of the dream-work as to the tenaciousopacity of its ‘‘regressive’’ character. It incites the motley proliferationof figures, it nonetheless imposes the blank sovereignty of its vacantopening.† It opens, I said; in short, it generates incessant constellations,incessant visual productions that do not stop the ‘‘incapacity’’ but, onthe contrary, clinch and underscore it. This persistence—or better:insistence—of the negative corresponds, in a certain way, to the paradoxof resemblance with which Freud was confronted before thedream and the symptom. A paradox whereby resembling would equaldissembling, and figuring would equal disfiguring, since figuring ‘‘justthe same’’ and taking relations inexpressible as such ‘‘into account’’was indeed equivalent to ‘‘making an appropriate modification in themethod of figuration characteristic of dreams.’’ 36Pertaining to this paradox, which Freud will never abandon whenhe has to account for an unconscious formation—for example when*du tour et détour; the sense of tour here is related to tournure, ‘‘turn of phrase,’’ andthat of détour to un discours plein de détours, ‘‘a roundabout way of speaking.’’†la blanche souveraineté de son ouverture à vide.