The analytical portraits
In Picasso's hermetic portraits we find an aside about the creative process that addresses the Bergsonian temporal model of the real and the possible: the work is not disengaged from a background of known possibities; instead, the artist simultaneously invents an unexpected piece underpinned by an expectation that it will gradually bring about on its own (in this sense, the aesthetic of reception and the hermeneutics of the horizon of expectation are based on pious illusions or misunderstandings resulting from bad habits.) For Bergson, the brilliant piece is not simply the one that stands out among all the others, but the one that retrospectively opens up an entire range of possibilities: it forces us to look at the past as well as the present in a new, different way. The result is a simultaneous reception, here and now, of the views associated with the perception of the model in the past, the present, and the future. And it is indeed this compossibility that becomes surprising. Moreover, it is hardly a coincidence that Picasso ended up producing the portrait based on his recollections. In the context of the analytical portraits, the views that are incompossible with each other, the front view and the profile, do not coexist any less. This coexistence constitutes the spatiality of the person. Contrary to the statements of certain critics, there is no destruction in these paintings, but rather a series of comings and goings back and forth between the perception of the moment and the resulting recollection.
Likewise, the passage from a prose poem @ [le passage d’un poème en prose] such as Américains d’Amérique (1906-1908) [QUESTION FOR AUTHOR@] in “Melanctha,”the second story in Three Lives, is symptomatic of this urge to free perception from the linearity of classic metre. As obscure as Picasso's hermetic works, these texts are also based on processes such as repetition and the pulverization of language. Self-quoting implies a sort of regressive movement, a going back, as in duration, where identical repetition is impossible; the situation and the act of enunciation can never be reproduced exactly, because the very act of repeating implies a change in enunciative perspective. Therefore, repetition is to reformulation what “white writing” was to Barthes: its impossible “degree zero”.
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Summary