On the Desire to Wake
Join the Department of Performance Studies as we welcome Grace Lavery, author and Associate Professor at UC Berkeley. This talk is cosponsored by NYU's Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and will be followed by a Q & A session moderated by Ann Pellegrini, Professor and Chair of Performance Studies.
What do we want, when we want to wake up? A key part of Freud’s theory of “secondary revision” in dreams concerns the peculiarity of the dream in which one believes oneself to have woken. Such moments, he thinks, are effects of the preconscious censor exerting a sort of belated force on the dream’s manifest content as it emerges, repressive effects whose character is therefore not libidinal in the usual sense in which psychoanalysis understands the content of a dream. Yet it is not hard to see a desire to wake up as possessed, at least in principle, of its own libidinal motivation: in the fantasy of the red pill, the retcon, the “darkest timeline,” and in many other scenes across the landscape of ecocidal crisis and post-liberal institutional collapse through which we move, urging ourselves and each other towards a transformation of consciousness, analogous to waking, that would constitute us as a revolutionary class in revolutionary times. In this paper, I will leaf through some of these contemporary fantasies of waking, precisely those whose libidinal character uncovers a history that psychoanalysis, for once, declines to name, but which exposes a drive beyond the reality principle. Tripping quickly across the wake-space of contemporary narrative, this lecture will briefly consider the prestige H. B. O. dramas The Leftovers and Westworld; Ye’s 2010 masterpiece My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy; and the Estonian Marxist computer role-playing game Disco Elysium (2019).
BIO:
Grace Lavery is the author of three scholarly monographs and one autocritical memoir, each of which explores the affordances of particular literary and cultural genres for transcriptions of sexual embodiment. Grace is currently completing a monograph concerning contemporary narratives of demonic possession, and an eco-horror novel about the West Midlands of England and the origins of the modern role-playing game.
Photo Credit: Cortesy of HBO - The Leftovers , Season 3, Episode 7.