The real, the surreal, writing about Breton's attempt to bring the real and the dream together yesterday reminded me of an analogous discussion in Blanchot. But in his work, as you would expect, there is something much more rich and strange.
Recall the thematics of the day and the night in Blanchot – the day is that place in which it possible to begin, when the human being can engage in those projects before it; the possible is its dimension. If the night is the contrary of the day, it is only that place wherein one rests in the midst of tasks and projects; it is still governed by possibility. Thus, day and night, action and repose belong to the same economy; to sleep after the day is done, to prepare for another day, is to remain secure in the measure which permits the project.
But there is another experience of both the day and the night. First of all, ‘the essence of night’:
In the night no refuge is to be found in sleep. And if you fail sleep, exhaustion finally sickens you, and this sickness prevents sleeping; it is expressed by insomnia, by the impossibility of making sleep a free zone, a clear and true resolution. In the night one cannot sleep.
Then, secondly, there is the day which ‘survives itself in the night’, which ‘exceeds its term’: the ‘interminable "day"’ linked not to the time of the project, but to ‘time’s absence’.
The interminable day, the essence of night: what do they name? They are linked, Blanchot writes, to ‘the threat of the outside where the world lacks’. The world: what does this mean? That field which is open to the human being which is measured in terms of what it can or cannot do. Can or cannot - isn't this to have it both ways? They must be thought, both of them, in accordance with what is possible for the human being - in terms of what the human being is able to do. Both alternatives keep the measure of this 'ability to be able' intact; they preserve the human being as the one for whom tasks and projects are possible. That which is outside my capacities is still organised by the measure of those capacities themselves.
What, then, does it mean to invoke the 'threat of the outside' - of an experience 'where the world lacks'? No longer, in this case, can tasks be weighed up in terms of what I am able or unable to accomplish. One must think, instead, of an event which no longer falls within the field of possibility. Put it this way: possibility finds itself inscribed within a space which it is unable to control, a space opening onto an outside which is no longer its outside. Or, once again, there is an inadequacy of the field of the possible to itself; as if within it there is something that escapes. Inside and outside; the outside is inside from the start, so long as this exteriority is undersood as it is given within the very possibility of possiblity. Could one call it, then, the impossibility of possibility, thinking of it in quasi-transcendental terms? Might one write, like Bataille, of the impossible as it would name an experience which falls outside what possible for a human being? Of an inability-to-be-able?
This, I think is what Blanchot thinks under the heading of both the essence of night and the indeterminable day as well as in the experiences to which he links these terms, respectively: the dream and the image (I'll come back to the image in a second post.)
In the essential night, nothing can be done; sleep is not the place of repose, but of restlessness. Coming from outside the world, outside the order or the economy of the possible, the dream is not the secret repository of our wishes, assembling the residues of our daily experience beneath whose content the psychoanalyst would be able to find latent desires. It must be thought, according to Blanchot, in terms of an insomnia or awakening which is no longer linked to the particularities of the dream. It is no longer you or I who dreams - you or I, that is, understood as those beings who can make their way in the world.
Who is it who dreams? Who dreams 'inside' me? But isn't the dream, on Blanchot's account, what is outside me? ‘The dream’, writes Blanchot, ‘is the reawakening of the interminable’. It is the return of an experience which cannot be delimited. Like the essential night, it does not permit rest; it presents no secure foothold from which to launch oneself into the future. It entails, rather, the collapse of the beginning and the repetition of an experience without any determinate content. Affirmed in this repetition is an experience which shatters not only the 'content' of the dream, but the very idea that a dream could be a receptacle of meaning, latent or otherwise. There is no ‘content’ to the dream since there is no interiority of the dreamer. The dream is the breakthrough of the outside - not your dream or mine, but something like the dream of the night - a dream from which the dreamer is reborn each time she dreams. But a rebirth which is momentary, which lasts an instant - only as long as the time of time's absence, which is to say, in the suspension of the time of work and the time of repose, of the temporal order of the possible.
Shattered time: the 'manifest' content of the dream, which evidences, according to Freud, the secondary processes through which its scattered ideations are synthesised into a narrative unity, always pass over the disjunction to which the dream belongs. For Freud, the unconscious is timeless - but what the latent desire the dream reveals belongs to an experience of time which is neither 'in' time (the time of the project, of the possible) nor timeless (that will lead Freud to posit a common, perhaps transcendental account of the symbolic universe to which we would all belong) but, as it were, the 'outside' of time 'in' time.
Who experiences the dream? Perhaps it necessary to think another locus of experience – not the personal ‘I’, the one who is able to sleeps or wakes, but the exposition or unfolding of this ‘I’: the 'il', the ‘he’, the ‘it’. But one must not think this as an unfolding, an explication of the 'il', so much as the unfolding which is there from the start, which inhabits experience as a kind of possible impossible. It is not a recurring dream, but what recurs in every dream; it is not the bearer of the personal secret, the key to a singular psyche which the psychoanalyst might unlock, but the exposure of the inside to the outside, the disclosure of the prior imbrication of the possible and the impossible, of time with time's absence.
‘Perhaps one could say that the dream is all the more nocturnal in that it turns around itself, that it dreams itself, that it has for its content its possibility’.
To what latent desire does the dream attest? Only to that desire to be extinguished in the instant where the 'il' comes forward to take your place. The desire for the essence of the night, the interminable day.