Jean-Luc Nancy. The Fall of Sleep.

Jean-Luc Nancy. "The Fall of Sleep." in: Charlotte Mendell (Translator). Lacanian ink. Vol. 33, Spring 2009. (English).

To sleep, perchance to dream…

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Sometimes, dream occurs. “Perchance,” as Hamlet says—he whose entire life and thinking are in a way devoted to nothing but sleep, to its shadow as well as to its shade (à sa tombée comme à sa tombe). Perchance to dream, that is to say perchance something of night passing into day, by chance, by misfortune or by capricious luck. All of a sudden, awakening finds close to it a scrap left over from sleep. Something was brought back from nothing, and in effect it is a configuration of nothing: scenes often colorful, with all kinds of tones, but whose dense coherency becomes blurred and quickly breaks apart in the acidity of day, all the more so in the fantasies or fantasmes of interpretation that, in the end, regularly and necessarily loses itself in the depths of that navel of the dream Freud speaks of to emphasize that everything here occurs before birth, before any distinction and any separation, any discernment of person or sense.

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