Death is a Dream
I was struck by a statement that Lacan made shortly before his death, to Catherine Millot, which is documented in the latest issue of The Lacanian Review: “[d]eath is a dream, among other dreams that perpetuate life […].”
On the one hand, we know that the function of dream censorship for Sigmund Freud was to prolong interpretive satisfactions within the dream-world. Hence, condensation, displacement, secondary revision, and significant representation all function to keep the dreamer from waking up and to allow interpretive satisfactions to persist.
On the other hand, Lacan, in a way, seemed to have added another function to that list, one which brought sex and death in proximity with one another: “sex and death are linked, as can be demonstrated by the fact that the bodies that reproduce sexually are the ones that are subject to death.” There is something about sex and death that push the speaking-being toward the satisfactions of the dream-world. I take this to mean that sex and death also promote the insularity of the dream-world, a resistance to waking up.
The very last teaching of Lacan unfolds in a dream-world without limit, or rather, within a dream-world that persists precisely through the limit. Hence, one does not wake up from the dream. Put another way, as Lacan was fond of saying: we wake up only to continue dreaming (in waking life). One popular interpretation of this idea has been that one wakes up to avoid confronting the navel within the dream-world itself.
The world is missing for each-speaking being. Yes, but which world? This should be qualified, since it is the common world, the world of ‘All,’ for ‘everyone.’ What amounts to the same: the speaking-being is insulated within a world onto themselves such that their dream extends only as far as their body allows. It was for this reason that I became interested, in recent years, with the body of octopi dreaming: it is clear that the octopus dreams with its body and not with signifiers.
There are some today who call for a theory that centralizes the experience of death. It is as if they believe that the theory of death — death drive — will offer us some leverage. To what? Perhaps to turn the world around, as if in some glorious revolution, or else to position oneself in a world where one can be seen: ‘I am a theorist, and my theory gives me me.’ In other words, it builds for the theorist a world, a world which, in some sense, produces a place for the subject. It is a subject who is seen in the world, by the world, as if it were a character who takes on the place of oneself in the dream-script. For Lacan, this was a cunning strategy to keep the dream moving and to avoid confrontation with the horror of the real — awakening!
Lacan still went a bit further. I will highlight two statements that are of interest to us:
- “Deep sleep is what makes it possible for the body to go on”
- “This world is but a dream of each body.”
Once again, the very last teaching of Lacan unfolds in a space that brings language and biology in proximity with one another, but not in the manner in which we might imagine. When we sleep, our body is inhibited. Lacan notes this when he opens his response to Millot: “[t]he desire to sleep corresponds to a physiological inhibitory action. The dream is active inhibition.” The second sentence is therefore a conclusion based upon the premises of the first: dreams inhibit the body. Yet, he continues: “total awakening is death — for the body.” It means that the body is implicated in this process that we can call ‘world-making.’
For those who do not have a world, then, as in, for example the case of psychosis where it is quite simply a matter of not being plugged into discourse in various ways, there is the experience also of the loss of world. For the melancholic, to take a common example, it is not a problem simply of ‘loss of world’ but of ‘worldlessness,’ by which I mean the experience of having never had a world to begin with (one only loses what one already had). In this sense, then, we can say that the melancholic gives what she doesn’t have: a world. It is no wonder that femininity and worldlessness have long been associated, as is evidenced in the third of the world’s great Abrahamic religions where the ‘partition’ promoted between the sexes within the holy scripture implies that the body is almost totally erased.
Worldlessness is not awakening.
Worldlessness, in this case, I take to be linked to the very idea that the speaking-being is within their own world. Each is a world onto themselves. Language demonstrates that it is entirely ‘hooked to death.’ One way that theorists have extrapolated from Lacan was to say that the ‘word is the murder of the thing.’ Yet, here, from Lacan, what we have is another possible reading: ‘the word is the thing doing its thing.’
Finally, what we have is that death remains entirely caught up in this insular modality of the world, anchored to each body, and, as such, is something of which the speaking-being — like any other animal — is completely ignorant. This again goes against the common reading of the Lacan who encounters Hegel through Kojeve: it is precisely our fear of death, as slaves, that distinguishes us from other animals and gives us a particular relationship to the imaginary and symbolic. For the Lacan of the very last teaching, he flattens the ontology and claims that speaking-beings are no different from any other animal in their inability to touch the domain of death in any genuine way:
The fact remains, however, that there is no evidence in animals, in the analogues of language, of an awareness of death. I don’t think there is any more in man, because of language: the fact that language speaks of death doesn’t prove that one has any knowledge of it at all.
What is a world, then? The question appears as an ontology but, in the final instance, it is demonstrated to be henology.
