I dreamt about you, but of whom did I dream? Was it you? Yes – you were present, you were there more strongly than you ever were: there, but with a presence which exceeds all presence, as though there with your presence was also the presence of everything understood now as a kind of shadow of the world, a shadow that spreads from each particular thing to join itself in a greater darkness. Not the night behind the day, but the night in the day, the day’s opacity.
I dreamt about you; I woke early and thought: why her? why now? and then: but you were only a mask the shadow wears. More: there is only the shadow and only masks and the world, the visible world is itself only the shadow of a shadow. I knew that the dreamer only resembled what, in me, escapes that self-relation which brings everything back to the same. The dreamer, the one who remembered ‘you’ had already forgotten ‘me’. Or the other way round: I had forgotten you in ‘you’ and remembered what is lost in the unity of the one who lays claim to his experiences, who would have it that life is lived in the first person.
In the end, the dreamed encounter repeats the encounter which occurred outside the dream. As if it was in the failure of a relationship – failed friendship, failed romance – that one learns of what hides itself in a relationship’s success: the encounter which takes place away from the world, which calls another forward in me as it calls another forward in you. Who is this other? What reveals itself in failure? The precarious encounter which tends to reveal itself when we are up against the most crushing power: the power of political oppression, of shared misery, or the power of death (as one of us comes close to death).
Ghost of the ‘successful’ revolution (the seizing of the Winter Palace, the storming of the Bastille): the encounters between us, protestors, demonstrators: ‘between us’ such that each is no-one in particular, that each, encountered, is the shadow of the man or the woman of power – of the one with a name and with a job, who bears his or her identity on the card of identity. The revolution’s ghost awoken when, as Benjamin remembers, the clocks are fired upon by revolutionaries. Do not entrust yourself to failure, Blanchot writes, for that is only to evince nostalgia for success.
Broken clocks: do not think of a future any other than that of the encounter. Graffiti on the wall in May 1968: ‘it is forbidden to grow old’. Become young again in the space of encounter. Forget me and I will forget you; forget the event which disjoins itself from the present.
I dreamt of you – I dreamt thereby of that common presence the revolution will awaken.
(Common presence – this phrase, title of an anthology by René Char, is the title of a book I would one day want to write.)
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