What is to be dreamed?

What Is To Be Dreamed?

On the Uncommon Saying: That May be Correct in Practice But It Is of

No Use in Theory

Bruno Bosteels

Communism is humanity’s memory of what has

not yet happened. In this way it resembles

a dream – you never know when the idyll

might turn into a nightmare.

— Oxana Timofeeva, "Unconscious Desire for

Communism"

The imminent awakening is poised, like the

wooden horse of the Greeks, in the Troy of

dreams.

— Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

This stomach is like some monstrous Trojan

horse that provides the foundations for the

fantasy of a totality-knowledge. It is,

however, clear that its function entails

What Is To Be Dreamed? 2

that something comes and strikes it from

without, otherwise nothing will ever emerge

from it. And Troy will never be taken.

— Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis

Theory and Practice Revisited

For a long time now philosophers have been in search of a unity or

fusion between theory and practice. From Immanuel Kant's late

reflections in "On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory

but It Is of No Use in Practice," inspired by the frequent assertion

(made by critics and enthusiasts alike) that the French Revolution was

caused by the "empty ideals and philosophic dreams" of Rousseauist

metaphysics, to Louis Althusser's coinage of the phrase "theoretical

practice" as a way of closing the gap between the two, we might even

argue that this search defines the essence of modern philosophy as

such, in that it bespeaks an intimate longing from which the act of

philosophizing cannot be separated. But the presence of such a longing

is not limited to philosophical activity alone. The same is true of

other activities as well. Kant himself refers briefly to the medical


or physical theories deployed, however minimally or unsystematically,

by doctors, artillerists or engineers as they go about their daily

business; and, in the realm of moral judgments or ethical decisions,

when a theory is based on the concept of duty, which is the only realm

Kant concerns himself with in this text, he insists on the

inevitability of taking into account the effects of theory on

practical experience: "For it would not be a duty to aim at a certain

effect of our will if this effect were not also possible in experience

(whether it be thought as completed or as always approaching

completion)."1 Completed or caught in the endlessness of an asymptotic

approach, this also goes to show that the longing in question is not

only for theory to turn into practice but also for practice to

recognize its own theoretical implications. A young Karl Marx already

recognized this as one of the goals of his critique of Hegel's

Philosophy of Right: "It is not enough that thought should seek to realise

itself; reality must also strive towards thought."2

Likewise, when Althusser speaks in terms of la pratique théorique in

his canonical works from 1965 that are comprised of the essays in For

1 Immanuel Kant, "On the Common Saying: That may be correct in theory but it is of no use in practice," Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 277.2 Karl Marx, "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Introduction," Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingston and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin, 1992), 252.


Marx and the collective project of Reading Capital, his goal is at least

twofold: on one hand, he is seeking to inscribe theory within a larger

set of social practices, including but not limited to political

practice, scientific practice, economic practice, and artistic

practice; but, on the other hand, to see theory as a form of practice

also means to extricate the notion of theory itself from the age-old

dialectic between theory and practice. One year later, in 1966, Michel

Foucault would make the same point that all thought, from the

beginning, is already an act: "As soon as it functions it offends or

reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or

reunites; it cannot help but liberate and enslave. Even before

prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even

before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, thought, at the level of

its existence, in its very dawning, is in itself an action--a perilous

act."3 Conversely, when soon thereafter the Mexican intellectual José

Revueltas speaks about the events of 1968, in an open letter to

comrades in France, in terms of their constituting an acto teórico, he is

alluding to the fact that political movements such as the student-

popular uprisings of that year both in France and in Mexico at the

same time represent a major leap forward in the theoretical

3 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 413.


understanding of struggles against the modern State: "The movement of

1968 was essentially a theoretical act, a theoretical action. What does this

mean that is so important? Above all, the point is not to devalue

theory by subordinating it to the blind activism and practicism that

are devoid of any content; nor to affirm that theory happens in the

streets—as some contend—born from the rabble."4 In short, not only is

theory one practice among others, but immanent to all innovative

practice there are always elements of theory. This much in fact should

have been evident already from Kant's definition of the two terms, a

definition in which no theory escapes being overdetermined by a

multitude of concrete conditions and all practice depends on the

observance of general principles of thought: "A sum of rules, even of

practical rules, is called theory if those rules are thought as

principles having a certain generality, so that abstraction is made

from a multitude of conditions that yet have a necessary influence on

their application. Conversely, not every doing is called practice, but

only that effecting of an end which is thought as the observance of

certain principles of procedure represented in their generality."5

4 José Revueltas, “Autogestión académica y universidad crítica,” in México 68: Juventud y revolución, ed. Andrea Revueltas and Philippe Cheron (Mexico City: Era, 1996), 149.5 Kant, "On the Common Saying: That may be correct in theory but it is of no use in practice," 275.


And yet, whether we are talking about the derivation of the right

practice from the correct theory, about the concrete application of an

abstract idea, about the practical aspect of all theory, or even about

the presence of theoretical acts immanent to the political struggles

at hand, all such formulations in more recent years also have come

under heavy attack for allegedly following an all-too-familiar

metaphysical pattern in which the real is only the realization of the

ideal and the measuring stick for evaluating an ideal is only ever its

capacity of becoming real. "This, then, is the argument: in the

answers that they have traditionally brought to bear on the 'special'

question 'What is to be done?' philosophers have relied, in one way or

another, on some standard-setting first whose grounding function was

assured by a 'general' doctrine, be it called ontology or something

else. From this doctrine, theories of action received their patterns

of thought as well as a great many of their answers," Reiner Schürmann

argues on the opening page of his book Le Principe d'anarchie (translated

into English as Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy). But

today, in the era of the supposed closure of metaphysics, all such

derivations of practice from a theoretical foundation must be

dismantled, interrupted, and thrown out of gear: "Now, the

deconstruction of metaphysics situates historically what has been

deemed to be a foundation. It thus closes the era of derivations


between general and special metaphysics, between first philosophy and

practical philosophy."6 Far from relying on either the ideal of a

possible fusion between theory and practice or the ethico-political

derivation of one from the other, philosophy according to this line of

reasoning would be better off by assuming not only the

unpredictability of its ulterior effects on the real but also the

impossibility of fully mastering the prior presuppositions that

effectively condition the work of philosophy in the first place.

Making this assumption, then, requires maintaining an incalculable gap

between theory and practice, without for this reason falling back on

the old scheme of the delay of speculative reason with regard to the

events of effective history, on the model of the owl of Minerva taking

flight only at dusk in the eyes of Hegel.

In what follows, however, far from pretending to exhaust the full

range of philosophical arguments in favor or against the unity of

theory and practice, I propose to read the fate of this problematic

more specifically by tracing its genealogy through the different uses

and invocations of a single dream-like image borrowed from the young

Marx. Indeed, I would venture to say that in the variegated reception

6 Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie Gros in collaboration with the author (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 1. See also Reiner Schürmann, "Que faire à la fin de la métaphysique?" in Heidegger: Cahier de l'Herne, ed. Michel Haar (Paris: L'Herne, 1983), 354-368.


of Marx's generic image of "the dream of something" (Il sogno di una cosa,

as Pier Paolo Pasolini would also choose as the title of a semi-

autobiographical novel, written between 1949-1950 but published only

in 1962, which bears witness to his youthful experience among poor

peasants in the Italian region of Friuli), we can find encapsulated a

succinct history of the hopes and deceptions, but also the victories

and crises of twentieth-century thought in its tense relation to the

Left.

Just Dreaming

In a letter to Arnold Ruge for the Deutsch-Französiche Jahrbücher (Franco-

German Yearbooks) signed in Kreuznach in the month of September 1843,

Marx defines the task before him and his collaborators--the Young Left

Hegelians from whom he is about to separate himself upon his arrival

in Paris where he will discover the revolutionary role of the

proletariat--by declaring himself to be openly antidogmatic. "Not only

has universal anarchy broken out among the reformers but also every

individual must admit to himself that he has no precise idea about

what ought to happen. However, this very defect turns to the advantage

of the new movement, for it means that we do not anticipate the world

with our dogmas but instead attempt to discover the new world through


the critique of the old," Marx tells Ruge. "This does not mean that we

shall confront the world with new doctrinaire principles and proclaim:

Here is the truth, on your knees before it! It means that we shall

develop for the world new principles from the existing principles of

the world. We shall not say: Abandon your struggles, they are mere

folly; let us provide you with the true campaign-slogans. Instead we

shall simply show the world why it is struggling, and consciousness of

this is a thing it must acquire whether it wishes or not." Marx

subsequently develops the image of the ideological slumber from which

humankind must be awakened so that it may gain consciousness of that

which so far has been only a dream. "The reform of consciousness

consists entirely in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in

arousing it from its dream of itself, in explaining its own actions to

it," he adds. "Our programme must be: the reform of consciousness not

through dogmas but by analysing mystical consciousness obscure to

itself, whether it appears in religious or political form. It will

then become plain that the world has long since dreamed of something

of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in

reality."7

Georg Lukács, in that classic of so-called Western Marxism which

is History and Class Consciousness, first published in 1923, on two occasions

7 Marx, "Letters from the Franco-German Yearbooks," in Early Writings, 207-209.


reprises the passage from Marx's letter to Ruge, as would Guy Debord

almost half a century later in The Society of the Spectacle, this time in a

typical situationist détournement, without marking the passage as a

quote from Marx.

For Lukács, the image of the dream is meant above all to

translate the fact that consciousness, far from having to be imported

from the outside, is active within any given situation. Revolutionary

consciousness, especially, works flush with the real. "Only when

consciousness stands in such a relation to reality can theory and

practice be united," Lukács claims in his essay "What Is Orthodox

Marxism?" included in History and Class Consciousness, right after having

cited the fragment about the dream and its consciousness from Marx's

letter to Ruge. Lukács goes on to develop the image with a long

explanatory paraphrase:

... the emergence of consciousness must become the decisive

step which the historical process must take towards its

proper end (an end constituted by the wills of men, but

neither dependent on human whim, nor the product of human

invention). The historical function of theory is to make

this step a practical possibility. Only when a historical

situation has arisen in which a class must understand


society if it is to assert itself; only when the fact that a

class understands itself means that it understands society

as a whole and when, in consequence, the class becomes both

the subject and the object of knowledge; in short, only when

these conditions are all satisfied will the unity of theory

and practice, the precondition of the revolutionary function

of the theory, become possible.8

Later on, in the essay "Class Consciousness," Lukács quotes other

parts of the third of Marx's letters to Ruge so as to make the same

point and underscore the importance of this correspondence as a whole.

"As early as the Correspondence of 1843 [with Ruge] he conceives of

consciousness as immanent in history. Consciousness does not lie

outside the real process of history. It does not have to be introduced

into the world by philosophers; therefore to gaze down arrogantly upon

the petty struggles of the world and to despise them is indefensible,"

Lukács explains, all the while insisting that this concept of

consciousness immanent to the real, which he detects in Marx's image

of the dream, at the same time should be seen as a polemical settling

8 Georg Lukács, "What Is Orthodox Marxism?" in History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971), 3. Lukács refers to the situation defined by the appearance of the proletariat as that class which is not one, such as it was "discovered" by Marx in 1843-44 in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.


of accounts not only with Hegel and the Young Hegelians but also with

utopian communists. "This provides us with the philosophical

foundation we need to settle accounts with the utopians. For their

thought contains this very duality of social process and the

consciousness of it. Consciousness approaches society from another

world and leads it from the false path it has followed back to the

right one. The utopians are prevented by the undeveloped nature of the

proletarian movement from seeing the true bearer of historical

movement in history itself, in the way the proletariat organises

itself as a class and, hence, in the class consciousness of the

proletariat."9 The notion of historical development that is invoked

here should not be misunderstood. Lukács is far from repeating the

positivist presupposition of a progressive and linear evolution,

following the objective "laws" of nature. Quite the contrary: when in

the essay "Legality and Illegality" at the end of History and Class

Consciousness he brings up one more time the image of the dream and its

conscious awakening in Marx, it is precisely in order to confirm the

need of the revolutionary as opposed to the linear-evolutionary

hypothesis. "Marxism is the doctrine of the revolution precisely

because it understands the essence of the process (as opposed to its

manifestations, its symptoms); and because it can demonstrate the

9 Lukács, "Class Consciousness," in History and Class Consciousness, 77-78.


decisive line of future development (as opposed to the events of the

moment)," Lukács concludes. And further:

When the young Marx proposed, the "reform of consciousness"

he anticipated the essence of his later activity. His

doctrine is not utopian, because it builds on a process

which is actually taking place. It does not contemplate

realising "ideals" but merely wishes to uncover the inherent

meaning of the process. At the same time it must go beyond

what is merely given and must focus the consciousness of the

proletariat on what is essential and not merely ephemerally

the case. This liberation takes the form at first of actual

rebellions against the most oppressive manifestations of the

capitalist economy and the capitalist state. These isolated

battles which never bring final victory even when they are

successful can only become truly revolutionary when the

proletariat becomes conscious of what connects these battles

to each other and to the process that leads ineluctably to

the demise of capitalism.10

Largely under the influence of his in-depth study of Lukács's

10 Lukács, "Legality and Illegality," in History and Class Consciousness, 258-259.


History and Class Consciousness, Guy Debord, too, repeats the image of the

dream from Marx in The Society of the Spectacle, his 1967 treatise which often

has been presented, and rightly so, as the key text to understand the

critical theory behind the events of May 1968 and which even in the

new edition of 1992 had no need of being modified, according to a

statement from its author who obviously never gave in to the

imperative of modesty: "A critical theory of the kind presented here

needed no changing not as long, at any rate, as the general conditions

of the long historical period that it was the first to describe

accurately were still intact."11 After quoting History and Class Consciousness

as an epigraph to the second part of his text, titled "The Commodity

as Spectacle," Debord also seems to be alluding to Lukács when, later

on, he repeats the Marxist thesis of the immanence of consciousness in

the real. "What Marx did was to demolish Hegel's separated stance with

respect to what occurs, along with the contemplation of a supreme

external agent of whatever kind. Theory thenceforward had nothing to

know beyond what it itself did," Debord postulates. And then, after an

abridged history of the different forms of organization and their

deformation, from the Second International to Stalinism and fascism,

11 Guy Debord, "Avertissement pour la troisième édition française," La Société du spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), ix; in English, "Preface to the Third FrenchEdition,"The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994).


he proposes that only the form of worker councils may still permit the

realization of Marx's dream: "And it is here too that the proletarian

subject can emerge from the struggle against a purely contemplative

role, for consciousness is now equal to the practical organization

that it has chosen for itself, and it has become inseparable from a

coherent intervention in history."12 Among other things, such an

intervention should also overthrow the spectacular time of the

commodity, the time of incessant consumption and production with their

pseudo-cyclical units of vacations and augmented survival. "In

contrast to the passing fashions that clash and fuse on the frivolous

surface of a contemplated pseudocyclical time, the grand style of our era

can ever be recognized in whatever is governed by the obvious yet

carefully concealed necessity for revolution," affirms Debord, just

before he diverts once more the image of Marx's third letter to Ruge:

"The world already has the dream of a such a time; it has yet to come

into possession of the consciousness that will allow it to experience

its reality."13 12 Debord, La Société du spectacle, theses 80 and 116 (translation modified). 13 Ibid., theses 162 and 164. Debord himself defines détournement as follows: "Détournement is the antithesis of quotation, of a theoretical authority invariably tainted if only because it has become quotable, because it is now afragment torn away from its context, from its own movement, and ultimately from the overall frame of reference of its period and from the precise option that it constituted within that framework. Détournement, by contrast, is the fluid language of anti-ideology." (thesis 208). For an excellent historico-intellectual commentary on the "theory" of The Society of the Spectacle in the context of the Situationist International and notably the influence of Lukács,


The Now of Recognizability

Halfway in-between these two fairly literal invocations of Marx's

letter to Ruge by Lukács and Debord, it belongs to Walter Benjamin to

have elaborated the image of the dream and its conscious awakening

into a veritable methodological principle for his peculiar

understanding of historical materialism.

Benjamin quotes the letter to Ruge precisely from a famous

collection of Marx's youthful writings edited by Siegfried Landshut

and Jacob Peter Mayer and published in 1932 under the title Der

historische Materialismus: Die Frühschriften (Historical Materialism: The Early Writings). The

other source for the development of the image of the dream and its

awakening comes to Benjamin from the tradition of French surrealism,

through a critical dialogue with André Breton and Louis Aragon. "The

realization of dream elements in the course of waking up is the canon

of dialectics. It is paradigmatic for the thinker and binding for the

historian," writes Benjamin in section N of his Passagen-werk (The Arcades

Project), titled "On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress."14 More

see Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord (Marseille: Via Valeriano, 1995).14 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 464 (annotation [N 4, 4]). The quotation of Marx's third letter to Ruge appears later on in this same section ([N 5a, 1]). The main title of the French translation of the Passagen-Werk, Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle, which is also the title chosen for several preliminary versions of his magnum opus, could very well have been inspired by this same correspondence between Marx and Ruge.


specifically, he asks himself: "Is awakening perhaps the synthesis of

dream consciousness (as thesis) and waking consciousness (as

antithesis)? Then the moment of awakening would be identical with the

'now of recognizability,' in which things put on their true--

surrealist--face."15 This moment of truth is comparable to a surrealist

"flash," that revelation of the "time of the now" (Jetztzeit) of

knowability, which arrives at the "point of rupture" of awakening and

which is "dialectical to the highest degree," serving as the main

point of reference for what Benjamin calls the "dialectical image,"

veritable cornerstone of his method in The Arcades Project in its entirety:

"In the dialectical image, what has been within a particular epoch is

always, simultaneously, 'what has been from time immemorial.' As such,

however, it is manifest, on each occasion, only to a quite specific

epoch--namely, the one in which humanity, rubbing its eyes, recognizes

just this particular dream image as such. It is at this moment that

the historian takes up, with regard to that image, the task of dream

interpretation."16

Thus, in the same letter from Kreuznach on September 1843, Marx writes: "In Paris, then, the old University of philosophy--absit omen!--and the new capitalof the modern world" (Early Writings, 206, translation modified).15 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 463-64 ([N 3a, 3]). 16 Ibid., 464 (annotation [N 4, 1]). Need we recall that this reliance on psychoanalysis at the service of Benjamin's heterodox form of Marxism was heavily criticized by his friend Theodor W. Adorno for being dangerously idealist and bourgeois? In a letter from Hornberg (Black Forest) of August 2-4, 1935, Adorno writes: "If you transpose the dialectical image into consciousness as a ‘dream’ you not only disenchant the concept and render it


In close proximity not only to surrealism but also, through the

latter, to psychoanalysis, what is at stake for Benjamin is to look at

history, as the ensemble of all that once was, with an eye for the

imminence of an act that might come and break the continuum of

history. As Slavoj Žižek will say many years later, in his book In

Defense of Lost Causes: "The reference to psychoanalysis is here crucial and

very precise: in a radical revolution, people not only 'realize their

old (emancipatory, etc.) dreams'; rather, they have to reinvent their

very modes of dreaming"; and, in fact, "if we only change reality in

order to realize our dreams, and do not change these dreams

themselves, sooner or later we regress back to the old reality."17 For

Benjamin, likewise, the problem concerns of the dialectical method.

The image of the time of the now, which shows us the dialectic at a

sociable, but you also deprive it of that objective unlocking power which could legitimate it materialistically. The fetish character of the commodity is not a fact of consciousness; rather, it is dialectical in the eminent sensethat it produces consciousness. This means, however, that consciousness or unconsciousness cannot simply depict it as a dream, but respond to it in equalmeasure with desire and fear. But it is precisely this dialectical power of the fetish character that is lost in the replica realism (sit venia verbo) of yourpresent immanent version of the dialectical image." See Theodor W. Adorno, "Correspondence with Walter Benjamin," New Left Review 81 (1973): 56. The fundamental problem for Adorno resides in the bourgeois kernel of the concept of individual consciousness that would be presupposed in psychoanalysis and ofwhich Benjamin, by transposing it onto the collective level, fails to propose a critique in terms of the class struggle. For a summary of the debate betweenAdorno and Benjamin on the subject of the psychoanalytical model for the interpretation of dreams, as well as on the influence on surrealism on this whole aspect of the Passagen-Werk, see Margaret Cohen, "Benjamin’s Marxisms," in Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 17-56.17 Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso, 2008), 196.


standstill, reveals in history a set of perils and promises on the

verge of being avoided or realized: "Still to be established is the

connection between presence of mind and the 'method' of dialectical

materialism. It's not just that one will always be able to detect a

dialectical process in presence of mind, regarded as one of the

highest forms of appropriate behavior," observes Benjamin. "What is

even more decisive is that the dialectician cannot look on history as

anything other than a constellation of dangers which he is always, as

he follows its development in his thought, on the point of averting."18

In any case, the task of the materialist historian, like that of

critical theory or the dialectic that serves as its method, resembles

the interpretation of dreams much more than the immediate and

sovereign presence of mind of self-consciousness modeled on God.

Benjamin thus shares with surrealism and psychoanalysis the

respect for the shadowy part that the unconscious projects on any and

all metaphysical or rationalist presupposition of consciousness--

whether of the individual cogito or the collective class-

consciousness. His concept of historical materialism depends precisely

on the salvaging or redemption of the potential of the unthought in

history. In this sense, he participates in a much vaster tendency in

contemporary thought, the one that Foucault in Les Mots et les choses: Une

18 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 469-70 (annotation [N 7, 2]).


archéologie des sciences humaines will much later describe as the "doublet" of

cogito and the unthought--one of the three "doubles" in the "analytic

of finitude" that would mark our modernity. "What is this being, then,

that shimmers and, as it were, glitters in the opening of the cogito,

yet is not sovereignly given in it or by it? What, then, is the

connection, the difficult link, between being and thought? What's

man's being, and how can it be that that being, which could so easily

be characterized by the fact that 'it has thoughts' as is possibly

alone in having them, has an ineradicable and fundamental relation to

the unthought?," asks Foucault. "A form of reflection is established

far removed from both Cartesianism and Kantian analysis, a form that

involves, for the first time, man's being in that dimension where

thought addresses the unthought and articulates itself upon it."19

Hence also the interest in the dreamwork: if the latter does not

think, as Freud liked to say, it is because it works on the unthought.

By contrast, what separates Benjamin from someone like Aragon,

and even more from Jung (Freud appearing only through second-hand

quotations in the Passagen-werk), is his insistence on the dialectical

moment of waking up:

Delimitation of the tendency of this project with respect to

19 Foucault, The Order of Things, 325.


Aragon: whereas Aragon persists within the realm of dream,

here the concern is to find the constellation of awakening.

While in Aragon there remains an impressionistic element,

namely the "mythology" (and this impressionism must be held

responsible for the many vague philosophemes in his book),

here it is a question of the dissolution of "mythology" into

the space of history. That, of course, can happen only

through the awakening of a not-yet-conscious knowledge of

what has been.20

Even the idea of dissolving myth into history may have been inspired

by the correspondence published in the Franco-German Yearbooks. Indeed,

just as the young Marx, in a letter to his father Heinrich, had

written: "If the gods had earlier dwelt above the earth, so they were

now made into its center," thus too, as we already saw, he hopes to

20 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 458 (annotation [N 1, 9]). Margaret Cohen explains very well to what extent the notion of awakening enters into tension with the rational tradition of the Enlightenment, such as it also survives according to Benjamin in orthodox Marxism. It is by no means a simple antithesis between wakefullness (in broad daylight) and dreaming (at night). She quotes in this regard another fragment from Convolute K of the Passagen-Werk: "It is one of the tacit suppositions of psychoanalysis that the clear-cut antithesis of sleeping and waking has no value for determining the empirical form of consciousness of the human being, but instead yields before an unending variety of concrete states of consciousness conditioned by every conceivable level of wakefulness within all possible centers. The situation ofconsciousness as patterned and checkered by sleep and waking need only be transferred from the individual to the collective." See Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 389 ([K1, 5]); and Cohen, Profane Illumination, 51-55.


dissolve all consciousness, obscure to itself, whether political or

religious, by confronting it with the current state of affairs: "Like

Feuerbach's critique of religion, our whole aim can only be to

translate religious and political problems into their self-conscious

human form."21

From the Right to Dream

And yet, how should one awaken humankind from the dream of something

so as to reach, without myth, the possession of the thing itself? And,

above all, what is this thing or this something that humankind has

always already dreamed?

Let us admit first of all, as a presupposition behind the image

of the dream, that the thing in question has nothing to do with the

official idea of Marxism as science of history in the objective or

positivist sense: "We know only a single science, the science of

history," Marx and Engels had written in a passage from The German

Ideology which, though subsequently crossed out by the authors, is also

taken up by Debord, whereas Alain Badiou, in his Theory of the Subject

appears to serve up a direct reply: "Science of history? Marxism is the

21 Karl Marx, "Letter from Marx to his Father," in The First Writings of Karl Marx, ed.Paul M. Schafer (Brooklyn: Ig, 2006), 78; and "Letters from the Franco-German Yearbooks," Early Writings, 209.


discourse with which the proletariat sustains itself as subject. We must never let go of

this idea."22 Against the positivist idea of a science of history

limited to knowledge of objective facts, we must admit that even

Marxists, whether orthodox or not, have a right to dream.

Already Lenin, in a curious passage from What Is To Be Done? takes up

the defense of dreaming, albeit while hiding his true face behind a

long quote from a third person. "We should dream!" exclaims Lenin. But

what is this dream? In fact, he is imagining the project of a

newspaper or periodical, not unlike Marx and Ruge's plans for the

Deutsch-Französiche Jahrbücher, which would gather the communists around a

common intellectual endeavor. "This newspaper would become part of an

enormous pair of smith’s bellows that would fan every spark of the

class struggle and of popular indignation into a general

conflagration. Around what is in itself still a very innocuous and

very small, but regular and common, effort, in the full sense of the

word, a regular army of tried fighters would systematically gather and

receive their training," proposes Lenin. "That is what we should dream

of!"23 However, almost immediately Lenin seems to give in to scruples: 22 See the quotation from Marx and Engels in Debord, La Société du Spectacle, thesis81; and the implicit reply in Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009), 44.23 V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, in Collected Works, vol. 5, trans. Joe Fineberg and George Hanna (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 509. Lars T. Lih, the foremost Lenin scholar today, has shown how this right to dream by no means vanishes after 1902 from Lenin's thought: "Thus both in What Is to Be Done? and his final articles, Lenin insists that we must dream. This coincidence is more


"We must dream!" Yes, but perhaps no: "I wrote these words and became

alarmed," Lenin adds, imagining the objections of comrades who might

threaten him by saying that it is irresponsible for a Marxist to

dream. "I go further," he imagines one of them as saying. "I ask, has

a Marxist any right at all to dream, knowing that according to Marx,

mankind always sets itself the tasks it can solve and that tactics is

a process of the growth of Party tasks which grow together with the

Party?” To which Lenin in turn imagines a preemptive answer, defending

at least the right to a certain way of dreaming, by way of a long

quotation from Dimitri Pisarev.

"The very thought of these stern questions sends a cold shiver

down my spine and makes me wish for nothing but a place to hide in,"

Lenin first confesses, as if it were shame that overcame him even more

so than fear. And, of course, such a link between the dream and the

affect of shame should not come as a surprise. As Freud explains: "In

dreams hidden impulses were stirring which stood in contradiction to

what might be called the dreamer's official ethical and aesthetic

creed; the dreamer was thus ashamed of these impulses, turned away

from them and refused to acknowledge them in day-time, and if during

than a rhetorical flourish—it is the way Lenin’s mind works. Lenin comes up with a nuts and bolts scheme for improving this or that, and then ties it directly to vast, world-changing perspectives." See Lars T. Lih, "We Must Dream! Echoes of What Is To Be Done? in Lenin's Later Career," Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal (available on-line).


the night he could not withhold expression of some kind from them, he

submitted to a 'dream-distortion' which made the content of the dream

appear confused and senseless."24 In the case of a confessed Marxist

who, aside from ethical or aesthetic beliefs, ought above all to

answer the demands of history, this sense of shame over the impulses

of our dreams should be all the more overpowering. Lenin, however,

tries not to give in to the pressures of censorship and distortion. "I

shall try to hide behind the back of Pisarev," he writes, before

quoting the following long passage:

"There are rifts and rifts,” wrote Pisarev of the rift

between dreams and reality. “My dream may run ahead of the

natural march of events or may fly off at a tangent in a

direction in which no natural march of events will ever

proceed. In the first case my dream will not cause any harm;

it may even support and augment the energy of the working

men.... There is nothing in such dreams that would distort

or paralyse labour-power. On the contrary, if man were

completely deprived of the ability to dream in this way, if

he could not from time to time run ahead and mentally

24 Sigmund Freud, "Josef Popper-Lynkeus and the Theory of Dreams," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey, vol. 19 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1961), 262.


conceive, in an entire and completed picture, the product to

which his hands are only just beginning to lend shape, then

I cannot at all imagine what stimulus there would be to

induce man to undertake and complete extensive and strenuous

work in the sphere of art, science, and practical

endeavour.... The rift between dreams and reality causes no

harm if only the person dreaming believes seriously in his

dream, if he attentively observes life, compares his

observations with his castles in the air, and if, generally

speaking, he works conscientiously for the achievement of

his fantasies. If there is some connection between dreams

and life then all is well.”

Finally, Lenin feels the need to add a pessimistic assessment: "Of

this kind of dreaming there is unfortunately too little in our

movement. And the people most responsible for this are those who boast

of their sober views, their 'closeness' to the 'concrete.'”25

The Anthropological Slumber

To the question "What Is To Be Done--With the Question 'What Is To Be

25 Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, 509-510.


Done?'" we can thus answer by following Jacques Derrida's example who,

at this point, seems to want to repeat Lenin's proposition: "We must

dream!"26 Except that Derrida promptly has to admit that neither the

question nor the way of answering the question, even by appealing to

the right to dream, come out unscathed from the crisis of Marxism and

the collapse of the Soviet Union, marked symbolically by the fall of

the Berlin Wall.

First, Derrida recalls the brief prehistory of the question "What

Is To Be Done?": a question not just borrowed from the title of

Nikolay Chernyshevsky's novel but also anticipated by Kant, when the

latter situates the project of his critical philosophy under the

rubric of three fundamental questions: What can I know? What should I

do? and What am I allowed to hope for? As Michel Foucault would recall

in Les Mots et les choses, the secret unity of this triple question,

addressed respectively in Kant's three Critiques, is linked to the

privilege attributed in each of its subdivisions to the role of "man"

capable of reflecting on his own limits--capable, in other words, of

taking the subject as the very object of the new human sciences. Thus,

an anthropological understanding of the nature of "man" is what 26 Jacques Derrida, "Que faire—de la question ‘Que faire?’?" in Derrida pour les temps à venir, ed. René Major (Paris: Stock, 2007), 45-62. Jean-Michel Palmier had underlined these "astonishing words" from Lenin which, "perhaps as a souvenir of Chernyshevsky, had made thousands of young Russians dream," in hisstudy Lénine, l'art et la révolution : Essai sur la formation de l'esthétique soviétique (Paris: Payot,1975), vol. 1, 71.


provides the cornerstone, or, rather, the foundation, for the whole

architectonics of Kant's critical project. In this regard Foucault

speaks of "a new slumber": no longer the dogmatic slumber already

combated by Hume but the anthropological slumber of "our" whole

modernity, of which Kant would be the preeminent example: "This had

already been formulated by Kant in his Logic, when to his traditional

trilogy of questions he added an ultimate one: the three critical

questions (What can I know? What must I do? What am I permitted to

hope?) then found themselves referred to a fourth, and inscribed, as

it were, 'to its account': Was ist der Mensch?"27

It is this anthropological slumber to which Foucault, like his

contemporaries Althusser and Derrida, opposes his own theoretical

antihumanism, even if for the time being it is only with the Homeric

laughter worthy of a figure of thought that would be entirely still to

come. Thus ends the next to last chapter of Foucault's book:

To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his

reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask

themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to

all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in

their attempts to reach the truth, to all those who, on the

27 Foucault, The Order of Things, 341.


other hand, refer all knowledge back to the truths of man

himself, to all those who refuse to formalize without

anthropologizing, who refuse to mythologize without

demystifying, who refuse to think without immediately

thinking that it is man who is thinking, to all these warped

and twisted forms of reflection we can answer only with a

philosophical laugh--which means, to a certain extent, a

silent one.28

As for the Leninist version of the question "What Is To Be

Done?," according to Derrida this too remains bogged down in the

quagmire of an all-too-metaphysical and teleological tradition. Thus,

when Lenin via Pisarev distinguishes the "good" way of dreaming from

the one whose effects would be "paralyzing" or even "harmful," the

decisive criterion refers to a certain reality principle, which in

turn offers the dreamer some guarantees only when carried by the

movement of history. By contrast, when this reference to the

historical reality is lacking, the dream is once again condemned as

pure fantasy or irresponsible adventurism: nothing but castles in the

air. Only on the condition of its possible realization, by

guaranteeing the contact between fantasy and reality, would a Marxist-

28 Ibid., 342-43.


Leninist have the right to dream. "This is because Lenin measures the

rift in terms of its 'realization,' that is his own word, in light of

the adequate fulfillment of what he calls the contact between the

dream and real life," Derrida comments on the occasion of a public

debate with Alain Minc. "The telos of this suturing adequation--which I

have tried to show also closes off the philosophy or ontology of

Marx--closes off the future of that which is to come. It prohibits us

to think that which, in justice, supposes always an element of

incalculable inadequacy, disjunction, interruption, infinite

transcendence. This disjunction is not negative, it is the very

opening and chance of the future, that is to say of the relation to

the other as that which and who comes."29 Thus, it would seem that the

thing whose dream humanity already possesses according to Marx's

letter to Ruge remains inscribed within a determinate horizon, which,

aside from the fact that it is a fairly recent invention linked to the

destiny of our modernity alone, is perhaps no longer ours. Rather,

this horizon would be a thing of the past that closes off our capacity

for thinking the future of what is to come. Therefore, the answer to

Lenin's question must necessarily remain suspended for Derrida: "If

'What is to be done?' remains a (or the) Marxist question, Derrida

would, in effect, urge us to avoid answering it. The only way to be

29 Derrida, "Que faire—de la question ‘Que faire?’?" 62.


responsible with regard to the future opened up by the question is to

avoid responding to it."30

Must we still dream, then? Can we still dream in the way Marx or

Lenin propose to do? According to Derrida, we may repeat Lenin's

proposition only if we are also capable of dissociating it from the

anthropological and teleological horizon in which the answer to the

question "What Is To Be Done?" remained imprisoned until now. "In the

way we have inherited it, both from Kant and from Lenin, this is a

modern question in a precise sense whose radicalism could not have

been deployed either in the Middle Ages or in the Cartesian post-

Middle Ages, in what was then called the world and which was bordered,

determined, in every sense of the word, by a theological, anthropo-

theological or theologico-political horizon." Thus concludes Derrida:

But conversely, and this is the whole problem of what comes

today and what makes up the acute specificity of our time,

the question "What Is To Be Done?" can no longer be deployed

in all its power, that is to say, without horizon, as long

as a certain horizon or certain theological or onto-

theological guarantees continue to provide it with a border,

30 Tim Walters, review of Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx, MLN 114.5 (1999): 1157.


as is still the case in Kant and Lenin, who had or presumed

to have a certain idea of man or of the revolution, of the

finality, the final stage, or the final adequation, of the

telos or a regulative Idea on the basis of which they raised

the question "What Is To Be Done?" which then in effect

became possible, but by the same token not vertiginous, not

abyssal, stopped in its limits, that is to say in its

horizon.31

Here, in sum, is the new question that deconstruction seems to

bequeath to us: Do we still have the right to dream after the crisis

of Marxism? Can we still possess the dream of that something that Marx

talked about, without needing for its consciousness to presuppose a

teleological philosophy of history and a metaphysical ontology of the

real, with the latter two presumed to have become obsolete today?

Dream Interpretation to the Rescue

It is partly with such questions in mind that Susan Buck-Morss, in

Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, picks up on

the mention of the right to dream in What Is To Be Done? She, too, though,

31 Derrida, "Que faire—de la question ‘Que faire?’?" 52-53.


shows herself at first to be skeptical. No, she argues against Lenin's

conclusions, not everything is for the best when there is contact

between the dream and real life. "Historical actualization thereby

becomes the criterion for the acceptability of socialist dreaming. It

seems to give proof that the dream was no mere fantasy. But in the

process, history itself becomes a dreamworld. The voluntarism of the

vanguard party, including the arbitrariness of its revolutionary

violence, is rationalized as history striding forward. Using the

masses as an instrument for realizing the dreamworld of history, the

armed vanguard "submits" to a conception of time that, so long as it

remains victorious, legitimates its own rule," Buck-Morss observes.

And, as if to echo the reservations felt by Derrida, who was part of

the same entourage in 1990 with whom the author traveled to the USSR,

she adds: "Of course, daydreams are salutary; we could not live

without them. But when their logic, in compensating for the

disappointments of today, becomes a 'plan' that locks in future

meaning, time's indeterminacy and openness is colonized, and the

utopian dream becomes a reality of oppression."32 And yet, even if she 32 Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamwork and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000), 67. In the same chapter, the reader can follow the episode of the trip to the USSR with its preparations, drunkenness and hangovers, where Buck-Morss is accompanied by Derrida, Jameson and other intellectuals from the West. From a more exegetical point of view, Buck-Morss of course had commented on the role of the dream image for Benjamin's methodology, in her earlier book The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989).


does not seem too sorry for the disappearance of mass utopias, this

same author also refuses to abandon their oneiric and critical energy

altogether.

In fact, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the problem seems to

have become completely different. As an expert in Walter Benjamin's

work, Buck-Morss in this context cannot not be reminded of the

importance of the moment of awakening. "We must wake up from the world

of our parents," she quotes from Benjamin's Passagen-werk, before

concluding with an even more disquieting question: "But what can be

demanded of a new generation, if its parents never dream at

all?"33 True, just as "capitalism was a natural phenomenon with which a

new dream sleep fell over Europe, and with it a reactivation of mythic

powers," as Benjamin had written, so too "the Soviet phantasmagorias

of production generated their own 'dream sleep,' this time falling

over the Revolution itself."34 But, for Buck-Morss, writing from the

belly of the monster at the very moment of the collapse of the Soviet

Union, it will not suffice to criticize communism by contrasting it

with the good utopia of democracy after the catastrophe of

totalitarianism: "The gap between the utopian promise believed in by

children and the dystopian actuality that they experience as adults

33 Buck-Morss, Dreamwork and Catastrophe, 209.34 Ibid., 208


can indeed generate a force for collective awakening. This is the

moment of disenchantment--of recognizing the dream as dream. But a

political awakening demands more. It requires the rescue of the

collective desires to which the socialist dream gave expression,

before they sink into the unconscious as forgotten. This rescue is the

task of the dream's interpretation."35

What has happened since then that might explain why this rescue

operation has been abandoned? Why has the sense of shame once more

taken over from the interpretation of dreams? Why do so many of our

contemporary interpreters hide their face and avert their eyes,

refusing to see the collective desires expressed in the dream of

something that humankind has always possessed? To be more precise, why

can shame no longer serve as a point of departure for the dream of a

collective transformation of society as a whole? After all, for Marx,

shame could be the carrier of a genuine revolutionary promise.

Speaking of how Prussia showed its true despotic side, Marx in his

first letter to Ruge had written: "This too is a revelation, albeit a

negative one. It is a truth which at the very least teaches us to see

the hollowness of our patriotism, the perverted nature of our state

and to hide our faces in shame," but immediately this causes Marx

preemptively to address Ruge's skepticism: "I can see you smile and

35 Ibid., 209.


say: what good will that do? Revolutions are not made by shame. And my

answer is that shame is a revolution in itself.... And if a whole

nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order

to spring."36 In stark contrast, if we consider the revolutionary cycle

of the short twentieth century that goes from 1917 to 1968 and its

aftermath, it turns out that at least for a certain orientation in

contemporary thinking only shame remains at the end of this cycle:

shame for once having had the dream of another world; shame for having

survived the disasters of the twentieth century in this world; shame

for being alive as a human being; or, purely and simply, shame for

being: an ontology of shame, for which we could use Jacques Lacan

notorious pun hontologie, a French portemanteau word combining honte and

ontologie. "'It's a shame [une honte],' as they say, which should produce

a (h)ontology [hontologie] spelled properly at last."37 Thus, especially

in the long wake of the events of 1968 and at least until the new age

of riots and uprisings heralded by the international financial crisis

of 2008, we witness nothing if not an exhaustion of the revolutionary

promise itself, concomitant with an absolutization of shame as the

insurmountable condition of being human, or of being as such. In the

36 Marx, "Letters from the Franco-German Yearbooks," Early Writings, 199-200.37 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire (livre XVII): L’envers de la psychanalyse, 1969-1970, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Le Seuil, 1991), 209; in English, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 180.


words of Giorgio Agamben: "Beyond good and evil lies not the innocence

of becoming but, rather, a shame that is not only without guilt but

even without time."38 As for the history behind this timeless sense of

shame, which would require that we write the genealogy of the becoming

shameful of the revolutionary dream itself, that is a different story

altogether, which will have to be told elsewhere.

38 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 103. I study this ontologization of shame through a genealogy of the reception of Marx's image of revolutionaryshame, in Chapter 4, "Affect," in Philosophies of Defeat: The Jargon of Finitude (London and New York: Verso, forthcoming).

What is to be dreamed?

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