The Image

Pierre Fédida's thinking on the image is dominated by melancholia and the dread of dying. The dream, as a model and experience, is fundamentally a work of mourning, mourning the unforgettable. Events but also, and above all, the face of the forgotten-unforgettable dead have a central place in what is unforgettable. That is why the image, in its essence, “touches the dead person”, “for the dead person as a face … − forgotten by the living as a name − is the face that the dying man seeks to meet up with so as to appropriate his own death, while he still hopes that the living will grant him the grace to let himself form an image of his face in them, that which will write itself and inscribe itself for the time of the memory of the mourning” (Fédida, 2009a, p. 216).

Extending Freud's thought in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he emphasises that, if the dream image is presence, it consists, including plastically, in its visuality, of forgetting, that is, forgetting that once upon a time it was clairvoyant and that it saw. Fédida takes up the term “voyance” from Arthur Rimbaud (Correspondances [Letter to Paul Demeny dated 15 May 1875] in Rimbaud, 2009 [1972], p. 249), a term that would be developed by Jean-Claude Rolland to designate the “visionary” state of the infans, before being one who speaks.

Citing Walter Benjamin in his article “La régression”, Fédida (2009c) expresses perhaps more clearly than in his philosophical and analytic article titled “Le souffle indistinct de l'image” (2009b) his thinking on the image, whether it be a memory image or a dream image; he develops the importance he accords to the places of infantile memory more than to its objects, which he calls the “genealogy of oneself”. This is what Benjamin (1934) wrote: “Memory… is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. He must not be afraid to return again an