Elina Staikou (Goldsmiths): ‘Vigil of the Archive: On Derrida Dreaming Benjamin’

Waking dreams are for Walter Benjamin hiding places for a world of things seeking what he calls “profane illumination”. In the Arcades Project awakening from a dream is one of the privileged ways of describing a new, dialectical method of doing history. “Dialectical image” is a “dream image” and “dialectical reversal” is the “flash of awakened consciousness.” The awakened consciousness, however, is not that which has interrupted dreaming but what preserves the dream’s interruption. The transformative, thus revolutionary force of dreams, the “dream wave”, is only unleashed as remembrance: dreams keep watch over awaking and it is this intermediate world, the threshold (which is also a methodological one) between dream and waking that reactivates what is lost and forgotten in the concrete historical situation of objects. “The history of dream remains to be written”, claims Benjamin in “Dream Kitsch”. How would such history be delimited? And what of its archive or archivability? Could there be a “politics of dreaming”, asks Jacques Derrida in “Fichus”, that “did not yield to the imaginary or the utopian?” How is dreaming related to the political question of the archive? This paper will address these questions by bringing into contact some of Benjamin and Derrida’s reflections on the politics, topology and temporality of dreaming and the archive and will situate them within the wider scope of these two thinkers’ encounter and the themes of law, genre, justice, messianicity and spectrality.