Discourse, Figure

Desire’s Complicity with the Figural

268 Desire’s Complicity with the Figural The figure enjoys a radical complicity with desire.1 This complicity is the hypothesis that guides Freud in his exploration of the operations of the dream. It allows for a strong articulation between the order of desire and that of the figural through the category of transgression: the “text” of the preconscious (day’s residues,memories) undergoes shocks that render it unrecognizable and illegible. In this illegibility, the deep matrix in which desire is caught finds satisfaction, expressing itself in disorganized forms and hallucinatory images. Let us take a closer look at how this machinery works. For this, it is useful to isolate three types of parts. The figure-image, that which I see in the hallucination or the dream, and which the painting and film offer me, is an object placed at a distance, a theme. It belongs to the order of the visible, as outline [tracé révélateur]. The figure-form is present in the visible, and may even be visible, but in general remains unseen. This is Lhote’s regulating line [tracé régulateur], the Gestalt of a configuration, the architecture of a picture, the scenography of a performance, the framing of a photograph—in short, the schema. By definition, the figure-matrix is invisible, the object of originary repression, instantly laced with discourse: “originary” phantasy. Nonetheless the figure-matrix is figure, not structure, because it is, from the outset, violation of the discursive order—violence against the transformations authorized by this order. By replacing it with a schema of intelligibility , one would render unintelligible its immersion in the unconscious. This immersion is proof, however, that what is at stake is indeed the other of discourse and intelligibility. To establish this matrix in textual space, all the more so if the latter is systematic, would be to imagine it as an ἀρχή [archè], to entertain a double phantasy in relation to it: first,that of an origin; second, that of an utterable origin. Yet the phantasmatic matrix, far from being an origin, testifies to the contrary that our origin is an absence of origin, and 269 desire’s complicity with the figural that everything that presents itself as object of an originary discourse is a hallucinatory figure-image, placed precisely in this initial non-site. Image, form, and matrix are figures insofar as each of them belongs to figural space according to a particular, though strict, articulation. Freud helped us to understand this articulation by invoking the energetic model of the reflex arc. The economic hypothesis he draws from this analogy is that any form of displeasure is a charge, and any form of pleasure, a discharge. Pleasure follows the principle whereby the energetic discharge is always pursued by the most expeditious means: the goal is to return the psychical apparatus to a state of least stimulation.2 In accordance with this principle, energy flows freely within the psychic system, ready to invest indiscriminately any zone, so long as it offers a possibility of discharge. This property, shared by those processes subjected to the pleasure principle, reveals the unbound character of the energy at work. When the use of energy is subjected instead to the reality principle,the function it obeys is no longer to eliminate all tension, but rather to maintain the energy at a constant level. Above all, in this case discharge cannot come at the cost of any zone in the psychical apparatus, since some of these zones communicate through facilitation while others are protected by contact-barriers, and since all the bindings through association and exclusion fall under the Ego’s control.The principle of this reality subordinates the possibility of discharge to the transformation of the relation between system and external world, either through the use of language or through motility, or both. The path followed by energy thus begins with perceptions and memories of perceptions, through wordpresentations , moving toward the centers and motor organs—what Freud calls progredient movement.3 Although the above description may well owe much to Fechner’s psychophysics , it already contains metaphorically a theme that will never be recanted and is essential to the position of the figural. The space in which energy flows is qualitatively different depending on whether this energy is bound or unbound.The space of pleasure and that of reality are alien to one another: this comes across already in Freud’s analysis of the situation of the infant, which is and remains that of the...