On Politics and Newspapers
In the essay on the metapsychology of dreams there is a footnote that describes the difficulty of the interpretation of dreams that deal with abstract ideas. Freud says, “We might compare it with the problem of representing in pictures a leading article from a political newspaper.” I can’t help but think of that strange and wholly unexpected digression on dreaming in the final chapter of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, the chapter on the all-Russia political newspaper:
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. On the ladders and scaffolding of this general organisational structure there would soon develop and come to the fore Social-Democratic Zhelyabovs from among our revolutionaries and Russian Bebels from among our workers, who would take their place at the head of the mobilised army and rouse the whole people to settle accounts with the shame and the curse of Russia.
That is what we should dream of!
“We should dream!” I wrote these words and became alarmed. I imagined myself sitting at a “unity conference” and opposite me were the Rabocheye Dyelo editors and contributors. Comrade Martynov rises and, turning to me, says sternly: “Permit me to ask you, has an autonomous editorial board the right to dream without first soliciting the opinion of the Party committees?” He is followed by Comrade Krichevsky; who (philosophically deepening Comrade Martynov, who long ago rendered Comrade Plekhanov more profound) continues even more sternly: “I go further. 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?”
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.
I shall try to hide behind the back of Pisarev. ”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 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.”
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”, the representatives of legal criticism and of illegal “tail-ism”.
Something strange in Lenin is that the obsession is with the dream-shape and never with the dream itself. The dreamshape allows the fluidity of the concrete, but these “political dreams” are as much without image – other than an enormous pair of bellows fanning sparks of class struggle – as is every front page of Iskra (which as far as I know never had images!) Perhaps Freud also points to the history of the cartoon, the image of – and as – distortion, as a solution to the problem of the image of political representation in print and dream.
On Love and Death
In the essay ‘on our attitude towards death’ from the Thoughts on War and Death he writes,
The complement to this cultural and conventional attitude towards death is provided by our complete collapse when death has struck down someone whom we love – a parent or a partner in marriage, a brother or sister, a child or a close friend. Or hopes, our desires and our pleasures lie in the grave with him, we will not be consoled, we will not fill the lost one’s place. We behave as if we were a kind of Asra, who die when those they love die. [Wir benehmen uns dann wie eine Art von Asra, welche mitsterben, wenn die sterben, die sie lieben.]
It is strange that Strachey adds the footnote to Heine but doesn’t note the textual variation clearly. In Heine’s poem, Der Asra, the final stanza reads, “Eines Abends trat die Fürstin / auf ihn zu mit raschen Worten: /»Deinen Namen will ich wissen,/ deine Heimath, deine Sippschaft.« / Und der Sklave sprach: » Ich heiße Mohamet / und bin aus Yemen, / und mein Stamm sind jene Asra, / welche sterben, wenn sie lieben.” [One evening the princess came to him, speaking quickly, “I want to know your name, your homeland, your clan”, And the slave said, “my name is Mohamet, and I come from Yemen, and my tribe is that of Asra who die when they love.”] Heine’s line is pretty much a direct translation from chapter 53 of Stendhal’s de l’amour: Sahid, fils d’Agba, demanda un jour à un Arabe : « De quel peuple es-tu? — Je suis du peuple chez lequel on meurt quand on aime, répondit l’Arabe. — Tu es donc de la tribu de Azra? ajouta Sahid.
But for Freud there is a radical reversal here. Quite unlike the Asra, who die when they love, the “kind of Asra” that Freud describes, as though we were one, love when they die, that is when they “die with” another. The tender love of the Asra described by Stendhal is extraordinary because this is not just another Liebestod, but a pure renunciation of life for love, in which there is no “dying with”, and while Heine gives this a class logic there is no death of his princess. For Freud we love when when die with precisely in that when we mourn may die with just as we live.
Anyway, back to work.