“It is an extremely dynamic and dramatic diagram. At first glance, one can see a layering of strata corresponding to what Freud notes, at the bottom left, as the ‘depths of repression.’ Within these depths, certain ‘scenes’ or representations—sometimes traumatic—are embedded, like nuggets enclosed within layers of sediment. Then all of this literally begins to heave upward: from those buried or deposited images, represented by Freud as small horizontal lines, there emerge three ‘symptoms,’ each one combining several repressed scenes. The energy of these emergences is emphasized by the abundance of diagonal lines—solid or dotted—that move back and forth, yet all converge toward those three small symptomatic points. They seem drawn to suggest to the viewer that they are capable of tearing through every protective surface. They are like ‘arrows of time’ that have suddenly risen from their usual, comfortable horizontality. They are untimely in that they are unexpected, aggressive, disruptive—and almost, if I dare say so, as joyful as they are dangerous. Like pikes brandished in the course of some revolutionary procession.”
Georges Didi-Huberman, Imagining Again (Imaginer recommencer), Les Éditions de Minuit, p. 62
( Rough translation )
The Loch Ness Monster and the Faith of the Gaze
I was in Lucian’s studio, my friend’s studio.
He was a renowned psychiatrist, though what everyone else called a “practice,” he insisted on calling his "studio".
– It’s where I work "with" my patients, he would say with passion.
That day, we talked for a long time, or rather, he did, about the Loch Ness monster.
– Nessie, he told me, any sensible person knows, or at least suspects, that it doesn’t exist. But the desire for it to exist, that, is real. We only see what we want to see. We build visibility out of absence.
Then he added:
– Perhaps it’s the same with works of art. They exist only because we’re waiting for them. A museum, a gallery, even this studio, could be a kind of lake, from which one hopes a shape will emerge.
The thought unsettled me. In spite of myself, I thought quietly:
– The Loch Ness monster isn’t a creature, it’s a mechanism of the gaze.
– You’re right, said my friend, as if he had read my mind.
And he went on:
– An intermittent image, made of appearances and disappearances.
What if every work of art were just that, an event of emergence, a temporary belief in the visible?
– We are watchers…
Those words had slipped from my mouth before I realized.
– Each look cast upon a work is a moment of faith.
And it’s that faith which brings visibility into being… Like that little figure, alone on his rock, who sees appear before him precisely what he believes in.
That simple remark, gentle as it was, sent a chill through me. Lucian, of course, noticed.
– Do you know the diagram of temporality Freud once sketched?
– Of course not,” I admitted.
He pulled out one of his notebooks and began, awkwardly, with a hand more used to writing than to drawing, to trace a small diagram.
Sigmund Freud, Diagram of Temporality:
‘Symptom’ and ‘Psychic Work,’ 1897 (‘Manuscript M’).
Ink drawing. Washington, Library of Congress, Sigmund Freud Archives.
Published in: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Paris, PUF, 2006, p. 312.
– Freud drew something like this, a "diagram of temporality"...
Lucian explained, sketching waves and curves.
– The time of the unconscious isn’t linear,” he said. It circulates, reverses, breathes.
The past isn’t behind us, it lies beneath, and from time to time it rises again. The present doesn’t erase; it replays. Your Leviathan, look, it does the same. It appears, disappears, reappears. Each hump on its back is a moment of memory that surfaces and sinks again with the creature’s movement, the one who "shows". Each hollow is like a forgotten thing, vanishing into the depths of the unconscious… only to return later. So I would say this monster is a kind of "time machine".
– It appears, disappears, reappears. Each hump, a memory. Each hollow, a forgetfulness… So the monster is a kind of time machine,” I echoed, perhaps stupidly, or at least mechanically.
It was then I understood that an image could contain multiple temporalities.
The monster and the lake together formed a diagram of the psyche:
the depths — the unconscious;
the surface — consciousness;
and whatever emerged, memory, emotion, fear, desire, rising to the surface.
To be continued…
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