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

156 Confronting Imagesand amenable to collection, classification, and preservation. The latterdisappear very quickly as definite objects and gradually melt into simplemoments—unintelligible moments—of ourselves, vestiges of ourdestinies, unclassifiable bundles of our ‘‘subjective’’ being. Art imagescirculate in the human community, and to a certain extent we cansay that they are made to be understood; at the very least, they areaddressed to, shared among, acquired by others. Whereas our dreamimages do not ask to be acquired or understood by anyone. 38 But thegreatest difference doubtless comes down to our being awake whenwe are before art images—in the waking state that makes for thelucidity, the force of our seeing—whereas we are asleep in dream images,or rather we are sealed off in them by sleep—from the sharedisolation* that perhaps makes for the force of our gaze.Paintings are of course not dreams. We see them with open eyes,but this may be what hinders us and makes us miss something inthem. Lacan aptly noted that ‘‘in the so-called waking state, there iselision of the gaze, and an elision of the fact that not only does it look,it also shows.’’ 39 † ‘‘It shows’’ in dreams because ‘‘it presents itself’’—with all the force that the verb darstellen has in Freud—and ‘‘it looks’’by very reason of the visual presence of what is presented ...Ourhypothesis is at base quite banal and quite simple: in a figurative painting,‘‘it represents’’ and ‘‘it sees itself’’—but something, just the same,shows itself there, too, looks at itself there, looks at us there. Thewhole problem of course being to discern the economy of this just thesame and to think the status of this something.How to name this? How to broach it? This something, this just thesame are in place of an opening and a scission: vision is here rentbetween seeing and looking; the image is rent between representingand self-presenting. In this rend, then, something is at work that Icannot grasp—or that cannot grasp me wholly, lastingly—because Iam not dreaming, but that nonetheless breaches me in the visibilityof the painting like an event of the gaze, ephemeral and partial. If itis true that every night dreams occasion an absolutely deployed visu-*isolement partenaire.†non seulement ça regarde, mais ‘‘ça montre’’; note that ça (‘‘it’’) is the standard Frenchtranslation of Freud’s Es, rendered in the SE as ‘‘Id.’’