In Defense of Lost Causes - Slavoj Žižek

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not simply its core which never appears directly, which is distorted by the translation into the manifest dream-text, but the very principle of this distortion—here is Freud’s unsurpassed formulation of this paradox:

      The latent dream-thoughts are the material which the dream-work transforms into the manifest dream. [. . .] The only essential thing about dreams is the dream-work that has influenced the thought-material. We have no right to ignore it in our theory, even though we may disregard it in certain practical situations. Analytic observation shows further that the dream-work never restricts itself to translating these thoughts into the archaic or regressive mode of expression that is familiar to you. In addition, it regularly takes possession of something else, which is not part of the latent thoughts of the previous day, but which is the true motif force for the construction of the dream. This indispensable addition [unentbehrliche Zutat] is the equally unconscious wish for the fulfillment of which the content of the dream is given its new form. A dream may thus be any sort of thing in so far as you are only taking into account the thoughts it represents—a warning, an intention, a preparation, and so on; but it is always also the fulfillment of an unconscious wish and, if you are considering it as a product of the dream-work, it is only that. A dream is therefore never simply an intention, or a warning, but always an intention etc., translated into the archaic mode of thought by the help of an unconscious wish and transformed to fulfill that wish. The one characteristic, the wish-fulfillment, is the invariable one; the other may vary. It may for its part once more be a wish, in which case the dream will, with the help of an unconscious wish, represent as fulfilled a latent wish of the previous day.13

      Every detail is worth analyzing in this marvelous passage, from its implicit opening motto “what is good enough for practice—namely the search for the meaning of dreams—is not good enough for theory,” to its concluding redoubling of the wish. Its key insight is, of course, the “triangulation” of latent dream-thoughts, manifest dream-content, and the unconscious wish, which limits the scope of—or, rather, directly undermines—the hermeneutic model of the interpretation of dreams (the path from the manifest dream-content to its hidden meaning, the latent dream-thought), which runs backwards the path of the formation of a dream (the transposition of the latent dream-thought into the manifest dream-content by dream-work). The paradox is that this dream-work is not merely a process of masking the dream’s “true message”: the dream’s true core, its unconscious wish, inscribes itself only through and in this very process of masking, so that the moment we retranslate the dream-content back into the dream-thought expressed in it, we lose the “true motif force” of the dream—in short, it is the process of masking itself which inscribes into the dream its true secret. One should therefore turn around the standard notion of the ever deeper penetration to the core of the dream: it is not that we first penetrate from the manifest dream-content to the first-level secret, the latent dream-thought, and then, in a step further, even deeper, to the dream’s unconscious core, the unconscious wish. The “deeper” wish is located in the very gap between the latent dream-thought and manifest dream-content.14

      A perfect example of this logic in literature is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A standard Marxist critical point about the novel is that it is focused on the dense family-and-sexuality network in order to obliterate (or, rather, repress) its true historical reference: history is eternalized as a family drama, larger socio-historical trends (from the “monstrosity” of revolutionary terror to the impact of scientific and technological revolutions) are reflected/staged in a distorted manner as Victor Frankenstein’s troubles with his father, fiancée, and monstrous progeny . . . While all this is true, a simple mental experiment demonstrates the limitations of this approach: imagine the same story (of Dr Frankenstein and his monster) told as a story of the scientist and his experiment, without the accompanying family melodrama (the monster as the ambiguous obstacle to the sexual consummation of marriage: “I’ll be there on your wedding night,” and so on)—what we would end up with is an impoverished story, deprived of the dimension which accounts for its extraordinary libidinal impact. So, to put it in Freudian terms: it is true that the explicit narrative is like a dream-text which refers in an encoded way to its true referent, its “dream-thought” (the larger socio-historical dimension), reflecting it in a distorted way; however, it is through this very distortion and displacement that the text’s “unconscious wish” (the sexualized fantasy) inscribes itself.

      The Romantic notion of monstrosity is to be understood against the background of the distinction, elaborated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, between Imagination and Fancy: Imagination is a creative power which generates organic and harmonious bodies, while Fancy stands for a mechanical assemblage of parts which do not fit each other, so that the product is a monstrous combination lacking any harmonious unity. In Frankenstein, the story of a monster, this topic of monstrosity is not limited to the narrative content; it somehow spills over and pervades other levels. There are three levels of monstrosity/fancy.

      1. First, most obviously, the monster reanimated by Victor is mechanically composed of parts, not a harmonious organism.

      2. Then, as the novel’s social background, social unrest and revolution as a monstrous decomposition of society: with the advent of modernity, traditional harmonious society is replaced by an industrialized society in which people interact mechanically as individuals, following their egotistic interests, no longer feeling that they belong to a wider Whole, and occasionally exploding in violent rebellions. Modern societies oscillate between oppression and anarchy: the only unity that can take place in them is the artificial unity imposed by brutal power.

      3. Finally, there is the novel itself, a monstrous, clumsy, inconsistent composite of different parts, narrative modes, and genres.

      To these three, one should add a fourth level of monstrosity, that of the interpretations provoked by the novel: what does the monster mean, what does it stand for? It can mean the monstrosity of social revolution, of sons rebelling against fathers, of modern industrial production, of asexual reproduction, of scientific knowledge. We thus get a multitude of meanings which do not form a harmonious whole, but just coexist side by side. The interpretation of monstrosity thus ends up in monstrosity (fancy) of interpretations.

      How are to find our way in this monstrosity? It is easy to show that the true focus of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the “monstrosity” of the French Revolution, its degeneration into terror and dictatorship. Mary and Percy Shelley were ardent students of the literature and polemics regarding the French Revolution. Victor creates his monster in the same city, Ingolstadt, that a conservative historian of the Revolution, Barruel—Mary read his book repeatedly—cites as the source of the French Revolution (it was in Ingolstadt that the secret society of Illuminati planned the Revolution). The monstrosity of the French Revolution was described by Edmund Burke precisely in the terms of a state killed and revived as a monster:

      out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination, and subdued the fortitude of man. Going straight forward to its end, unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising all common maxims and all common means, that hideous phantom overpowered those who could not believe it was possible she could at all exist.15

      Furthermore, Frankenstein is dedicated to Mary’s father, William Godwin, known for his utopian ideas about the regeneration of the human race. Godwin entertained millennial expectations in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice (1793), where he exulted in nothing less than the coming of a new human race. This race, to emerge once over-population had been scientifically brought under control, was to be produced by social engineering, not sexual intercourse. In the novel, Victor says:

      A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.

      The symbolic association between Godwin and monsters was forged in 1796—1802, when the conservative reaction against him reached its peak. During those years, demons and the grotesque were frequently used to deflate Godwin’s theories about the utopian regeneration of humanity. Conservatives depicted Godwin and his writings as a nascent

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