Interlude XXVIII. Foucault - part 8 - Dreams & Death

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XXVII. Foucault - part 7

From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...

Chapter 3 - The Heart Laid Bare - Cont...

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Foucault found “The Case of Ellen West” fascinating [described in too much detail just before this]. West, he wrote... was “caught between the wish to fly, to float in an ethereal jubilation, and the obsessive fear of being trapped in a muddy earth that oppressed and paralyzed her.” To fly toward death, “that distant and lofty space of light,” was to end life. But by committing suicide, “a totally free existence would arise” -- if only for a moment -- “one that would no longer know the weight of living but only that transparency where love is totalized in the eternity of an instant.”

...[Ludwig] Binswanger reinterpreted dreams in the light of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Freud, he implies, was wrong to explain dreams as the repository only of repressed wishes and their (unreal) fulfillment, representing the vicissitudes of intelligible fantasies arising from everyday experience, fantasies that might yet become useful in conscious existence. Thus one of the tasks of psychoanalysis, in Binswanger’s view, is to help the dreamer wake up and start translating his or her fantasies into reality. In Heideggerian terms, the dream itself is “inauthentic,” almost by definition, for it is the product, according to Binswanger, of a “self-forgetting” existence. In order to become authentic, the human being must “make something” of itself, in the shared sphere of history; only then does the human being (or Dasein) emerge, healed and whole, to “participate in the life of the universal” -- a vision of the ultimate goal that Binswanger borrows from Hegel as much as from Heidegger...

Dasein (German pronunciation: [ˈdaːzaɪn]) is a German word which means "being there" or "presence" (German: da "there"; sein "being") often translated in English with the word "existence". It is a fundamental concept in the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger particularly in his magnum opus Being and Time. Heidegger uses the expression Dasein to refer to the experience of being that is peculiar to human beings. Thus it is a form of being that is aware of and must confront such issues as personhood, mortality and the dilemma or paradox of living in relationship with other humans while being ultimately alone with oneself.

-Wiki

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Foucault... turns both Binswanger and Freud upside down. “Psychoanalysis,” he bluntly asserts, “has never succeeded in making images speak.”...

Foucault’s main thesis is shockingly simple” the dream “is the birth of the world,” “the origin of existence itself.” The dream must therefore be approached, not as a psychological symptom to be analysed, but rather as a key for solving the riddle of being -- just as Andre Breton and the surrealists had been arguing since the 1920s.

“In the darkest night,” writes Foucault, “the glow of the dream is more luminous than the light of day, and the intuition borne with it, the most elevated form of knowledge.” Far from being “inauthentic,” as Binswanger supposes, the dream can “throw into bright light the secret and hidden power at work in the most manifest of presence.” For Foucault, the dream is a privileged domain for thinking through what Heidegger called the unthought -- a shadowy clearing where, in a moment of vision, a human being can, as it were, recognize itself and grasp its fate.

...the fate one needs to embrace, according to Nietzsche’s parable of eternal recurrence -- is precisely what the dream reveals. While dreaming, a human being “is an existence carving itself out in barren space, shattering in chaos, exploding in pandemonium, netting itself, a scarcely breathing animal, in the webs of death.” Out of this chaotic vortex are spun certain themes, motifs that recur over and over again, entangling “an existence fallen of its own motion into a definite determination,” pointing toward an inescapable fate. “Man has known, since antiquity, that in dreams he encounters what he is and what he will be, what he has done and what he is going to do, discovering there the knot that ties his freedom to the necessity of the world.”

“pandemonium” - coined by John Milton “A place where all demons live”.

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...The ancient Greeks and romantic poets were closer to the mark [than Freud]: “in the dream, the soul, freed of its body, plunges into the kosmos, becomes immersed in it, and mingles with its motions in a sort of aquatic union.” Encapsulated in the dream is “the whole Odyssey of human freedom,” illuminating “what is most individual in the individual,” the “ethical content” of a singular life. As Nietzsche once put it, “nothing is more your own than your dreams.”

Foucault agrees. In the dream, he writes, we find “the heart laid bare.”

But what if “the heart laid bare” reveals only the most disquieting of oracles? “One must desire to dream and know how to dream,” Baudelaire had declared in the famous journal he entitled “My Heart Laid Bare”: “A magic art. To sit down and write.” But to what purpose? For what Baudelaire’s dreams revealed when he wrote them down was a “delight in bloodshed,” “the intoxication of the tortured “Damiens),” a “natural delight in crime,” a “natural pleasure in destruction,” an inescapable feeling that “cruelty and sensual pleasure are identical, like extreme heat and extreme cold.”

Foucault’s dreams also seethe with cruelty and destruction. When he consults “the law of my heart,” in order to “read my destiny there.” he discovers not only that “I am not my own master,” but that he is possessed by a “determination to ruin the simplest things.” [that phrase appears again. I have a feeling it is a poor translation of something more interesting]

...”In the depth of his dream,” writes Foucault, “what man encounters is his death, a death which in its most inauthentic form is but the brutal and bloody interruption of life, yet in its authentic form, is the fulfillment of his very existence.”

“Suicide is the ultimate myth,” he goes on to explain: “the ‘Last Judgement’ of the imagination, as the dream is its genesis, its absolute origin... Every suicidal desire is filled by that world in which I would no longer be present here, or there, but everywhere, in every sector: a world transparent to me and signifying its indebtedness to my absolute presence. Suicide is not a way of cancelling the world or myself, or the two together, but a way of rediscovering the original moment in which I make myself world.... To commit suicide is the ultimate mode of imagining.” To dream one’s death as “the fulfillment of existence” is to imagine, over and over again, “the moment in which life reaches its fullness in a world about to close in...”

My dreams are puzzling and occasionally quite wonderful, but either they are not particularly revealing or I am blind -- and shouldn't you hold the key to your own dreams? And what does it say about them if you don't hold the key?

I’m confused about Foucault’s metaphysical basis for this view of death. For a pantheist, a quantum idealist like me, it actually makes a kind of sense. But Foucault seems to be coming from a simply psychological place, unless I’ve missed something.

I’ve been asked what it is about Foucault that interests me. The obvious things are his connections to Nietzsche and other philosophical figures of interest to me. But, upon further consideration, I think the key thing is that he takes philosophy seriously. For me the most disconcerting thing about studying philosophy, at an American university in the early 1970s, was that most of the professors could as well have been teaching civil engineering. The daughter of a professor in my department was in one of my freshman classes and she had absolutely no idea what philosophy was or what her father did.

For most people, even within the university, philosophy is just another academic field like accounting or the study of dinosaurs. For Nietzsche and Bataille and Foucault it is a matter of life and death. Literally.

Something else has become obvious to me as I've read ahead in this book; this is not just a book about Michel Foucault, instead it is an intellectual history of the early to late-middle twentieth-century. To borrow an image (still to come) from Georges Dumézil and Marcel Mauss, Foucault and all the others are locked in an intellectual "structure" that, like a spider's web, links them all together with its threads. They are effectively stuck together and the web itself defines (and limits) the paths they are free to take.

Foucault actually has a problematic sort of advantage here in that his daemon is bat-shit crazy. Like Socrates, Foucault is effectively -- though also often dangerously -- directed down his "one unique path" whether he, or anyone else, likes it or not.

Next: Interlude XXVIX. Foucault - part 9.