Photography and surrealism surraliste (Figure ) overlays this psychical, reality of thought (through the linguistic text) on to an existing

photographic sign system of reality. A surrealist image and its uncanny effect is produced not by ambiguity around the image (polysemy), but by an ambivalence in fundamental distinctions (e.g. fear and excitement, good and bad, love and hate and so on)50 and a condensation of these conicting values at the level of a signier. This is what produces the enigma and drives on our wish to resolve it, to see beyond the already seen.The text of the manhole picture reveals a space that we cannot know by looking, like a dark space in the night or the contents of the void posited in the back of Le Violon dIngres. By violating the common sense of the photographic reference to concrete reality, potential meanings are propelled towards a rhetoric of contradiction. In each of the three categories given above (mimetic, prophotographic, enigmatic) a photograph can be made surreal by the fact that it draws attention to itself as sign or as a component of a sign as in the emblem, which perplexes the spectator as to its proper meaning. Whether enigmatic, prophotographic (including collage) or mimetic (including image-text), the surrealist signier plays with the status of signs, troubling what Barthes called the stubbornness of the referent in photography with what the surrealists hailed as the marvellous, a conation of material and psychical reality. In this clash of material and psychical reality, each image as sign comes close to the assumption of a dream-image,5 a rebus, picture-puzzle and the surreal staged as enigmatic signier. Jean Laplanche introduces the concept of enigmatic signier into the Freudian theory of sexuality as a means of analysis of the enigmatic sexual pleasure of the other, which like the uncanny is that which is other-wise, comes originally from the other.52 In discussing enigmatic signiers Laplanche gives pride of place to the primal scene, how a child perceives parental copulation, and quotes Freuds original account in his text:
It is, I may say, a matter of daily experience that sexual intercourse between adults strikes any child who may

In the unconscious love and hate are not available as contradictions, since contradiction negation is not recognized in the unconscious. The visual image in surrealism is often conceived as a dream-image, as epitomized in Salvador Dalis paintings (but begun earlier by Yves Tanguy) or even Ren Magritte. This stylized painterly genre of the dreamimage falls across the prophotographic and enigmatic categories, due to the painted verisimilitude of enigmatic signs. See also Chapter , The automatic image. Laplanche, Time and the Other, Essays on Otherness, p. .
42