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

Image as Rend 155he insists on the distortion (Entstellung) involved in every symptomformation(Symptombildung)—we find at the end of his chapter on thedream-work a famous turn of phrase whose apparent simplicityshould not obscure its profound theoretical import. ‘‘It does not think,calculate, or judge in any way at all’’ (urteilt überhaupt nicht), whichalready takes us poles apart from the Urteilskraft, the power of judgmentthat still resonated through the whole of Kant’s philosophy. Sofor judgment and its ‘‘function’’ will be substituted a ‘‘work’’—a workmuch less synthetic and much less abyssal than all the functions in theworld ...a work that ‘‘restricts itself to giving things a new form.’’ 37A verb that here says to us both formation and distortion—a loss of‘‘form’’ (in the sense of the Idea) in any case, a failure of intelligiblesubsumption. in any case.But just how does this evocation of the dream-work bear on ourquestion? Didn’t Freud warn us from the outset against all ‘‘artistic’’understanding of the dream-work, drawing an emphatic distinctionbetween the rebus, posited as the paradigm for dreams, and the pervasivenotion of dreams as graphic compositions? He did indeed, andsimply listing the ‘‘artistic’’ examples in Freud’s text clearly won’t sufficeto elucidate the profound value of such examples. The questionof the Freudian aesthetic, the question of what Freud thought aboutart, and how he hoped to provide a psychoanalytic account of artisticcreativity—all these questions remain dubious in their very formulation,but in any case they don’t come into our present topic. Theproblem here is quite different: it’s a matter only—this will already bea quite a lot—of understanding how Freud’s notion of figurability, ifas we said it ‘‘opens’’ the classic concept of representation, might concernor breach our gaze when we look at art images. In short, howthe representation that ‘‘is opened’’ can show us something more inwhat we usually call the representations of painting.We are not before* painted or sculpted images in the same way thatwe are before, or rather in the visual images of our dreams. Theformer present themselves as tangible objects; they are manipulable*devant.