Dreams as quasi-Testimony

Theodor W. Adorno noted down his dreams throughout his life, but never completed the book of them that he planned to publish in the late 1960s. In the years before his death he started to make selections, even having a number of typescripts of the texts prepared by his wife, Gretel. While some of these dreams appeared in the edition of his writing in the 1970s, they have generally been considered to be marginal texts to his oeuvre – indeed, almost all of Adorno’s theorisations of dreaming have been considered marginal. Taking Adorno at his word, that knowledge should address “that which fell by the wayside, […] the waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic,” this paper explores the centrality of dreaming to Adorno’s thinking, through an essayistic reading of one of Adorno’s shortest and most enigmatic dreams from November 1956. Its interpretation establishes a constellation of problems and images of metapsychology, historical materialism, and the metaphysics of musical time, and their relationships to memory and forgetting, to regression and “Eingedenken”. Out of this constellation appears a history of critical theory in the twentieth century, ranging from Benjamin’s early essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ to Adorno’s final works. This history addresses the transformed conditions of critical theory – of psychoanalysis, Marxism, and aesthetics – in the wake of Auschwitz. Finally this leads to a problematisation of interpretation itself, of its “Trauer” to use Adorno’s word, in the aftermath of the holocaust.

PhD Thesis, 2021

My PhD Thesis was written at Birkbeck College, University of London, between 2011 and 2021. A PDF of the whole work can be found below. If you read it and have any comments or thoughts, then do get in touch with me. I’m more than happy to have (polemical) conversations about all aspects of Benjamin and Adorno’s works. In truth the thesis is about two thirds of a slightly larger work, which will hopefully soon become a book. I’m also happy to discuss publication with anyone who is interested (I know nothing about how to publish things!) This thesis is concerned with the role of memory and forgetting in the thought and writing of Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin. While it takes as its source materials their complete works and letters, these are addressed through close readings of the smallest parts: jotted down dreams, turns of phrase, and repeated images. The introduction sets the scene: it addresses a landscape composed of language and the rubble of script. In this landscape, Adorno and Benjamin’s perspectives are set against Hegelian and Nietzschean theories of memory and forgetting. The first half of the thesis (Chapters 1 and 2) essays a pair of notions developed between the 1910s and the 1940s. In the first chapter, Benjamin’s concept of remembrance [Eingedenken] is considered from the perspective of a number of fragments on the phenomenon of blushing, written between 1919 and 1920. The second traces Adorno’s concept of regression [Regression] in the figure of flowers, picked from the landscape by children, and returned to the home. Following this image leads from a critique of organicism in musical works to an account of Adorno’s metapsychological thought. Together, these chapters together develop an unreconciled ‘natural-historical’ dialectic of memory and forgetting: the first, a mode of apparently historical thought that illuminates nature; the second, a form of apparently natural thought rupturing into historical knowledge. The second half (Chapters 3 and 4) attempts to show what happened to this dialectic after Auschwitz. Chapter 3 offers an extended reading of a single dream that Adorno noted down in November 1956, while also developing a reading of Benjamin’s essay ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ from the other side of the Holocaust. The final chapter considers the memory and forgetting of Benjamin’s death within Adorno’s late metaphysics, albeit with a detour through Benjamin’s late commentaries on Brecht’s lyric poetry.

Critical Quarterly, 2019

Are dreams a kind of poetry? This question is raised, although never definitively answered, by The Interpretation of Dreams. At times, Freud treats dreams not as symptoms to be unravelled, but as evocative, indeterminate, nocturnal compositions. Where dreams are handled as aesthetic objects rather than clinical problems, a different kind of analysis ensues, at odds with the book’s more dominant hermeneutic style. The resulting poetics of dreams suggests an alternate route from dream interpretation to literary criticism: an associative, rather than symptomatic, Freudian reading.

Making - or Not Making - Sense of Dreams / Trouver - ou non - un sens au rêve, 2024

Dreams frighten and attract us because of their ›otherness‹, their manifold deviations from the world we know when we are awake. One of the most consistently used techniques of coming to terms with this otherness has been the attempt to ›make sense‹ of dreams, to consider and portray them as messages which can and have to be deciphered. On the other hand (and much more rarely), dreams have been considered as a welcome source of entertainment, or as a key instrument to expand the limitations of a rational and conventional world view. Our book analyses aspects of this dialectic in factual dream reports and in fictional representations of the dream in literature, film, music, and painting. Examples are taken from a great variety of cultures and historical periods. Their authors and artists include: Adorno, Agualusa, Andreas-Salomé, Apollinaire, Artmann, Beckmann, Benjamin, Breton, Carroll, Carter, Diderot, Droste-Hülshoff, Flaubert, Goethe, Gondry, Grandville, Ji Yun, Johannot, Kafka, Keller, Klinger, Kubin, Li Gongzuo, Liu E, Ma Jian, Meyrink, Michaux, Minnelli, Montaigne, Mora, Ofenbauer, Okri, Oppenheim, Plath, Proust, Pushkin, Rousseau, Scho¬pen¬hauer, Scott, Seghers, Sorel, Sōseki, Wagner, Walser, Wang Jian, Weiner, Wu Jianren, Yuan Mei, Zschokke, and many others.

Rilune - Revue des littératures européennes, 2018

Pour citer cet article Tania Collani, « Modern Imagery of Dreams-A Critical Enquiry », in RILUNE-Revue des littératures européennes, no 12, Dormir, transcrire, créer : le rêve littéraire à travers les genres, les domaines et les époques, p. 1-18 (Mirta Cimmino, Maria Teresa De Palma, Isabella Del Monte, éds.), 2018 (version en ligne, www.rilune.org). Résumé | Abstract FR Les rêves en littérature sont-ils toujours les mêmes ? Ou changent-ils avec le temps, en suivant les évolutions du contexte social, politique et culturel ? S'il est vrai que l'homme a toujours rêvé, faut-il encore se demander s'il a toujours rêvé de la même manière. Et surtout si le rêve après les théories de Freud (1900) présente le même degré d'innocence qu'avant. Quels sont les outils que la critique littéraire peut utiliser pour analyser la présence des rêves, à un niveau formel et thématique, avec un corpus tiré de la production avant-gardiste européenne du début du XXe siècle-entre autres, des auteurs surréalistes comme André Breton, Giorgio De Chirico, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, ou des futuristes et des imagistes comme Filippo Tommaso Marinetti et Ezra Pound ? Une étude critique sur la modernité des rêves en littérature doit pouvoir aller au-delà d'une approche ciblée uniquement sur le rêve comme thème et objet, parce qu'il touche l'imaginaire humain et poétique en même temps, en ayant recours à un dénominateur commun, l'image. Mots-clés: Rêve, Littérature, Imaginaire, Avant-garde, Poétique. EN Are dreams in literature the same at any time? Or do they evolve as time passes by, with different social, political and cultural settings? Indeed, men have always dreamt; but have they always dreamt in the same way? Is dreaming after Freud's theories (1900) as innocent as it was before? Which tools can literary criticism use to analyse the presence of dreams, at both formal and thematic level, within a corpus of early 20th century European avant-garde literature-including, among others, Surrealist authors such as André Breton, Giorgio De Chirico, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, or Futurists and Imagists such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Ezra Pound? A critical enquiry on the modernity of dreams in literature should go beyond a sole thematic approach, because it deals with human and poetical imaginary-where the image is the common denominator between these two dimensions.

Postmodern Openings

In this text we aim to present the way Sigmund Freud discovered the universe of the unconscious and the significance of dream interpretation. For "the Father of psychoanalysis", the unconscious is not just a depository of some mental contents that belong to a subconscious , but a genuine reservoir of autonomous energies that have their own determinism, different from that of conscious. The Viennese psychoanalyst is the supporter of a determinism at the unconscious level, which is revealed by the mechanisms of the dream. For Freud, dreams are the royal path through which the unconscious emerges. Only in the dream conscious can look strictly passively at the way in which unconscious contents emerge in symbolic forms through all sorts of condensations and transfers of repressed drives. In the dream, the Ego becomes free and ready for the real meeting with the Self, that only he can recognize and understand in its most intimate sense. However, dreams, though ephemeral, represent extremely effective successes for everyday psychic life. In the end, I concluded that the dream contents can be properly comprehended only by the dreamer, and the psychoanalyst can help the dreamer only to recognize these subtle understandings of his own unconscious.

This paper suggests that The Interpretation of Dreams contains some of Freud's most provocative, far-reaching, and powerful psychoanalytic insights regarding futurity, intersubjective communication, and the relationship between the dream, the dreamer, and the world. By focusing on the specific status and function of the dream (as opposed to all other psychic actions), this paper explores how and why the singular language of dreams-and the very possibility of dream interpretation-provide a specifically psychoanalytic model of translation. The essay examines the specific status of the dream by appealing to a selection of important and influential philosophical readings of Freud's text

Janus Head, 2000

If a philosopher should prove to me on solid logical grounds that dreams are not experiences, or that we only think we dream, or dream we dream, and that therefore the thing we refer to as a dream is a delusion, I would still want to write about dreams as I do. If it was a delusion that woke me last night in a cold sweat, it was a convincing one, and I can depend on being deluded again tonight. We are such stuff as these delusions are made of. Bert O. States The Rhetoric of Dreams Perusing today's academic journals, one comes away with the mistaken impression that Freud freshly minted the hermeneutic key to dreams in 1900 with The Interpretation of Dreams, and that for the past century his adherents have retained the exclusive license to have duplicate keys made. In reality, psychoanalysis is but one hermeneutic system of many, able to lay authoritative claim to no intrinsic interpretive superiority. As Gabbey and Hall state in their analysis of the dreams of Descartes, The interpretation of dreams is rarely answerable to either evidential or settled theoretical control. When the phantasms of the dreaming mind seem unaccountable, as they often do, they seem to belong to a mental world beyond the reach of historical, philosophical, or scientific analysis, a world for which the rules of methodological engagement seem inappropriate, rather than merely impossible to observe. (651) No single interpretive system, whether Freudian, Jungian, Greek, or aboriginal, can prove its dreamwork methodology comprehensive and unassailable. The very subjectivity of the dreaming experience centers dreams in the human, rhetorical realm, and out of the objective and scientific. This paper examines some of the key hermeneutical and rhetorical principles involved in this most mysterious realm of human inventio, and presents a variety of historical approaches to interpreting dreams. We will see how the ancient Hebrews and Greeks thought of dreams as originating outside the dreamer; because dreams came from God or the gods, their messages were considered authoritative and they were honored and enacted. We will then turn to modern approaches to dreamwork and see how the agency of dreams and the responsibility for interpreting dreams has shifted to the dreamer. Finally, this paper suggests that dreams may be seen as a kind of proto-rhetoric, which is to say that the hermeneutic step of interpreting dreams comes before their rhetorical articulation, making dreamwork a process that questions the usual assumption that rhetoric precedes interpretation.

Typologizing the Dream / Le rêve du point de vue typologique, 2022

There is nothing like a firmly established typology of dreams – simply because the taxonomies on which existing typologies are based vary widely: They can be oneirocritical, thematic, or based on dreaming characters or their responses, on narratological functions, etc. The essays in this volume will discuss a broad range of dream types, with a special focus on nightmares and erotic, funny, indigenous and children’s dreams. Examples are taken from a great variety of cultures and historical periods. Their authors and artists include: Akinari, Barrie, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Black Elk, Buñuel, Burroughs, W. Busch, Calvino, Cantilo, Cao Xueqin, Cardano, Carroll, Coogler, Corkran, Cortázar, Crébillon fils, Dalí, Eco, Ende, Foer, Fuseli, Garnier, Gatore, Grévin, Grünbein, Guo Moruo, Hauptmann, Hawthorne, Hebbel, Heine, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Huysmans, Ilboudo, Ilibagiza, Kafka, F. Lang, Leiris, Li Yu, Malerba, Mizoguchi, Morgenstern, Mussorgsky, Nodier, Nolan, Okopenko, Pushkin, Radcliffe, Rimbaud, Robison, Schafer, Schiller, Schnitzler, Schwarz-Bart, P.B. Shelley, Soqluman, Storm, Szittya, Tamapima, Tchaikovsky, D.M. Thomas, Tristan L’Hermite, Valenzuela, Vava, Yourcenar, Yu Dafu, and many others. Areas of interest: Cultural, literary and medial history of the dream; dreams in Literature; dreams in film; theory of the dream; the nightmare; dream in the visual arts; dreams in computer games / video games; dream reports.