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

Image as Rend 157ality and an absolutely sovereign reign of the gaze—if that is true,then I can broach this something of the painting only by way of aparadigm, not of the dream as such (what is a dream as such? No oneknows), but of the dream-forgetting (every morning we know whatthat is, by which I mean that we experience it). In other words: thevisual event of the painting happens only starting from this rend that,before us, separates what is represented as remembered from everythingthat presents itself as forgotten. So the most beautiful aesthetics—the most desperate, too, since they are generally doomed to stalemateor madness—will be those aesthetics that, in order to open themselvescompletely to the dimension of the visual, want us to close our eyesbefore the image, so as no longer to see it but only to look at it, andno longer forget what Blanchot called ‘‘the other night,’’ the night ofOrpheus. 40 Such aesthetics are always singular, strip themselves barein not-knowledge, and never hesitate to call vision that which no wakingperson can see. 41 But for us historians and art historians, we whoawaken every morning with the sense of a sovereign but forgottendream visuality, writing and speech are all that are left to us to makethis oblivion into an eventual support for our knowledge, its vanishingpoint above all, its vanishing point toward not-knowledge.Perhaps now we will better understand the importance of the paradigmof the dream. What above all makes it a paradigm? Not so muchfor the object of interpretation—namely the work of art that wemight want to ‘‘compare’’ to the dream—as for the solicitation to interpret,to use an expression advanced by Pierre Fédida in the field ofpsychoanalysis itself: ‘‘What theory uncovers is directly dependent ona Traumdeutung as dream-practice. Here the theory receives its originalmeaning only from the status acquired by the speech [parole] of theinterpretation and as such is solicited by the dream.’’ 42 Dream-forgettingplays an absolutely crucial role in this solicitation, since by gatheringso to speak the ‘‘material of sleep,’’ it proposes to interpretationthe very opacity of its ‘‘vanishing point’’:What remains of a dream upon waking is destined to befragmentary, and that is how psychoanalysis understands it.Destined to fall apart, it has no vocation as symbolic synthe-