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Dreaming in Dark Times: Six Exercises in Political Thought
What do dreams manage to say—or indeed, show—about human experience that is not legible otherwise? Can the disclosure of our dream-life be understood as a form of political avowal? To what does a dream attest? And to whom?
Blending psychoanalytic theory with the work of such political thinkers as Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, Sharon Sliwinski explores how the disclosure of dream-life represents a special kind of communicative gesture—a form of unconscious thinking that can serve as a potent brand of political intervention and a means for resisting sovereign power. Each chapter centers on a specific dream plucked from the historical record, slowly unwinding the significance of this extraordinary disclosure. From Wilfred Owen and Lee Miller to Frantz Fanon and Nelson Mandela, Sliwinski shows how each of these figures grappled with dream-life as a means to conjure up the courage to speak about dark times. Here dreaming is defined as an integral political exercise—a vehicle for otherwise unthinkable thoughts and a wellspring for the freedom of expression.
Dreaming in Dark Times defends the idea that dream-life matters—that attending to this thought-landscape is vital to the life of the individual but also vital to our shared social and political worlds.
Blending psychoanalytic theory with the work of such political thinkers as Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, Sharon Sliwinski explores how the disclosure of dream-life represents a special kind of communicative gesture—a form of unconscious thinking that can serve as a potent brand of political intervention and a means for resisting sovereign power. Each chapter centers on a specific dream plucked from the historical record, slowly unwinding the significance of this extraordinary disclosure. From Wilfred Owen and Lee Miller to Frantz Fanon and Nelson Mandela, Sliwinski shows how each of these figures grappled with dream-life as a means to conjure up the courage to speak about dark times. Here dreaming is defined as an integral political exercise—a vehicle for otherwise unthinkable thoughts and a wellspring for the freedom of expression.
Dreaming in Dark Times defends the idea that dream-life matters—that attending to this thought-landscape is vital to the life of the individual but also vital to our shared social and political worlds.
232 pages, Hardcover
Published March 28, 2017
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July 5, 2017
"Dark times are turbulent political moments in which the public realm has been infected with a kind of black light," Sliwinski says. In such times, it is hard to describe and communicate what is wrong with the political situation when language itself is threatened and undermined: "under the pretext of upholding old truths, a kind of official language emerges, a vehicle that is designed to degrade truth, to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege, to stall conscience and thwart our capacity to think." Hannah Arendt's Men in Dark Times observed that "human speech becomes divested of its power to represent and transmit the truth during these periods. A kind of perverse language emerges instead that tends to serve those who wish to prolong the distorted political situation." The ability to think and communicate must be preserved not only to save oneself from darkness but to save others. "Mandela spent the better part of his lifetime digesting this difficult knowledge: in dark times, it is not only individual lives at stake but the larger human world."
What's the use of dreaming? “The significance of dream-life has been slowly eroded throughout modernity. It is as if, in some strange way, this era’s potent fantasies of rationalization, technological progress, and perfectibility have slowly claimed center stage, displacing the older image of the human being as a small, frangible creature that sleeps and dreams.” One purpose of dreaming, just to begin: "[a]s Didier Anzieu describes, dreams weave a new psychical skin that can reinforce an ego whose defenses are embattled or defective." Furthermore, Sliwinski says that "dreaming is among our most intimate encounters with the experience of being governed by an agency other than the self," and therefore dreams are important "not only to the life of the individual but also to our shared social and political worlds." Recurring nightmares in particular demand courage from us as the psyche clamors to understand the thing it fears and to grow beyond it. Development of such courage prepares us for political life.
Sliwinski focuses on "the stories we have trouble telling, the things we struggle to voice — even to ourselves." This could include political prison, battlefield trauma, or personal secrets. She presents case studies of dreams, refraining from too much interpretation, as she wants the dreams to "be encountered anew so that readers could wonder at this strange disclosure."
Dream interpretation was important to the Greeks, and Artemidorus' Oneirocritica in the second century "distinguished between the dreams that concern bodily states and the dreams that refer to events in the world." "For the Greeks, these formal exercises were considered requirements in the pursuit of proper ethical conduct....how could one govern others if one could not govern oneself?...dreaming and dream interpretation was one of the chief means to fold the force of a difficult reality."
What's the use of dreaming? “The significance of dream-life has been slowly eroded throughout modernity. It is as if, in some strange way, this era’s potent fantasies of rationalization, technological progress, and perfectibility have slowly claimed center stage, displacing the older image of the human being as a small, frangible creature that sleeps and dreams.” One purpose of dreaming, just to begin: "[a]s Didier Anzieu describes, dreams weave a new psychical skin that can reinforce an ego whose defenses are embattled or defective." Furthermore, Sliwinski says that "dreaming is among our most intimate encounters with the experience of being governed by an agency other than the self," and therefore dreams are important "not only to the life of the individual but also to our shared social and political worlds." Recurring nightmares in particular demand courage from us as the psyche clamors to understand the thing it fears and to grow beyond it. Development of such courage prepares us for political life.
Sliwinski focuses on "the stories we have trouble telling, the things we struggle to voice — even to ourselves." This could include political prison, battlefield trauma, or personal secrets. She presents case studies of dreams, refraining from too much interpretation, as she wants the dreams to "be encountered anew so that readers could wonder at this strange disclosure."
Dream interpretation was important to the Greeks, and Artemidorus' Oneirocritica in the second century "distinguished between the dreams that concern bodily states and the dreams that refer to events in the world." "For the Greeks, these formal exercises were considered requirements in the pursuit of proper ethical conduct....how could one govern others if one could not govern oneself?...dreaming and dream interpretation was one of the chief means to fold the force of a difficult reality."
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