“Death is a Dream that Perpetuates Life”
Notes: “Improvisation: Desire for Death, Dream and Awakening,” Jacques Lacan (Catherine Millot’s Notes, 1981)
A turning point in the reception of Freud’s earlier work, 1899: The Interpretation of Dreams. Another turning point: Lacan’s turning point, which happened during his later period: we wake up only to continue dreaming, or, rather, there is no awakening. Think of the Father, Don’t You See That I’m Burning dream, but generalized. A new question occurs, published within a year of Lacan’s death concerning the relationship of “awakening” and “death.”
Colin Wright wrote: “death is no escape from the sickness of the signifier, since death is conceivable only on its basis.” I think of those who tend toward suicide: do they not mistake death with the real thing, foreclosing the signifier since “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
We never wake up, but what of death? The flight toward death is a device through which one maintains the dream.
So, how does it go? In 1974, Catherine Millot asked Lacan a question: “is the desire for death to be seen in terms of the desire to sleep or the desire to wake up?” It was a fascinating question since it links death to desire, rather than death as a limit-point to desire. It renders death and desire in continuity, a consistency. But can death be a continuity, really? Impossible!
Lacan remained silent, instigating a time for waiting. Millot confesses that she had resolved herself to believe that no response to the question was coming back to her. Except: Lacan, after half an hour, gave a detailed answer. This serves as the basis for the text.
Lacan begins by linking the desire to sleep with a physiological inhibitory action. So, the desire-to-sleep inhibits something in the body. He produces a provocation in a short sentence: “the dream is an active inhibition.” This is a fascinating idea. We saw it already in Freud’s theory of dream censorship: the censorship is a process which sustains the dream, against the trauma of waking up. It is at this point that the Symbolic hooks something, but what? Lacan’s answer was that the Symbolic hooks up the body via language. It does this by preventing sleep from interruption. This holds the dream together. “Thanks to the Symbolic, total awakening is death — for the body. Deep sleep makes it possible for the body to go on.”
So, the symbolic is what sustains a dream-World. It inhibits the body, and allows the body to hold, allowing it to go on…
Lacan insists that Freud’s notion of death drive, which was developed some time after his period of thinking about dream interpretation, entails that any Awakening is also the destruction of the Body. Why? The reason: death drive is beyond pleasure-reality principle, its beyond or opposition, which means that it is outside World, outside Body.
The next sentence is where a genuine tickle happens for me: “Life, on the other hand, is beyond any awakening.” It means that life is a deep sleep. Life is sleeping. To live is to remain asleep, dreaming. But then, life aspires to death — why?, because life is always incarnate, it is lodged in a body, and since we desire total awareness, then we desire to disincarnate the body, to dismantle world, to awakening and death.
Yet Lacan qualifies all of this: even this aspiration cannot go that far, toward the Beyond because it always remains a dream, a dream of that awakening. So, his famous statement is: “we never wake up: desires sustain dreams.” I am perplexed here: what of psychosis, where desire is not evident? Is this a new conception of desire, one that holds also for psychosis? Or is he limiting his sayings only to those who feel life lodged in a body? Those of have bodies. Then, “death is a dream, among other dreams that perpetuate life, that of dwelling in the mythical.” It is this statement that I offer to those grand theorists of death drive, to those who believe that death or suicide is the answer to the social problems of our time. It was my response, in a way, several years ago, to Todd McGowan, Slavoj Zizek, and even those whose work is not very good but who promote an edgy Death Death Death, Negativity Negativity Negativity, fashion show.
What I find fascinating is the usage of the word “myth,” which is repeated in various ways in Lacan’s discourse. Why this word, suddenly? I note with interest that Freud began to focus on myth also during his last period. He began with dreams, within the dwelling place of the sleeping state, and then symptoms, creating writing, day dreaming, and so on. And then, in the final period, mythologies. Lacan seems to be nodding to this trajectory in Freud’s thinking when he invokes the word as well. One believes — through language — that is is possible to join up with the absolute real, to an awakening; this is the very stuff of mythologies.
This is an assault on knowledge. The dream occurs with thanks to language, we drown ourselves in absolute knowledge without trace. We wish to merge with this knowledge underpinning the world — oceanic. “This world that is but a dream of each body.”
He returns again to the body. The body is hooked to death, but language is what testifies to it. Lacan says that he has abandoned any clear answer to the question of whether or not this is grounds for establishing the operation of “repression”: “is this that is repressed? It’s hard to say. It is thinkable that all language is designed so as not to think death, which is the least thinkable thing there is.”
Oh, but what of sex, which was the question from which psychoanalysis really began? He states something matter-of-fact: sex is linked to death, precisely as evidenced by the fact that those who reproduce through sex are also those subjected to death. I offer the following formula for deciphering this: Freudian psychoanalysis = Sex, Lacanian psychoanalysis = Death. This is what is paramount, what is at the base.
Repression of the sexual non-rapport is the device through which language denies death. This is the point for Lacan, and it is new for me. I pause on it for a moment: it is through the sexual non-rapport, its repression, that language denies death. You see, death, as absolute real, is ungraspable, and the sexual non-rapport, through repression, is what sustains this dream, this desire for death. Lacan says: “language makes up for the absence of sexual relation and thus masks death, although it is capable of expressing it as a deep desire.”
Lacan says: “the fact that language speaks of death is no proof that one has any knowledge of it at all.”
I am using the translations of Philip Dravers.
