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D o c u m e n t

From VISIble and InVISIble 1 (1953)

Dolfi TrosT

From Part two: “the SenSe oF an Image”

I had a dream: a suite of scenes and familiar theater where, as always,
fragments of known and unknown beings moved. A dream like all the
others, one whose routine symbolizations of desire it is useless to detail,
for the symbolic content of any interpretation that might be useful to the
wide-awake is of little importance here.2

Toward the end, a few seconds before I woke, this dream took a

tragic turn.

It is upon this final set of images, as common an occurrence for other

dreamers as for myself, that I must turn our attention. At a certain point
the dream lost its lively, anecdotic, and condensed character, and launched
suddenly into a last, terrible scene, where it came to a halt.

It is after veering in this direction (for reasons unknown and not at
all justified by the preceding dramatization) that it becomes disquieting
to the highest degree and that, once it takes hold, it intimates the possibil-
ity that the dreamer might never emerge from that bottomless darkness
from which the dream first arose.3

1
2

Dolfi Trost, Visible et invisible (Paris: Éditions Arcanes, 1953).
The dream is a “motor derangement”: the oneiric scene is continually in agitation, and any
dream without hyperkinesia becomes a nightmare and interrupts itself. The transformation
of movement into “oneiric catatonia,” usually heralded by a period of anguish, is thus expe-
rienced as a progressive petrification of the interior scene.
Thought becomes cinematographic, the sentiment of nature rises anew, the geometry of
autumn lets loose a clamor.

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trost | from visible and invisible

When we dream in this way, this final scene, which in its intrinsic

violence forces us back awake, also places us before an age-old problem.
It is a problem directly addressed to us, one from which the only escape
is to wake. And as we know, this waking is experienced as a consolation,
but only because of the qualitative change in our situation and not at all
because we have answered to the terrible interrogation posed during
the night.

This final scene—the nightmare—cannot be reduced to the phe-
nomenon of déjà vu, to the mechanism of unconscious compensation, or
to any other rational explanation that is perhaps true in a sense but devoid
of any interest for the intrinsic significance of the dream.4

Reaching the place where the dramatization had led me, by way of

the adventures that weave the plot of all dreams, I inwardly saw myself in
a street, at the point of heading home.

For those inclined to detect, in oneiric images, memories from diur-

nal life, I will add that the street, and the house that appeared there,
quite resembled those in the world of wakeful perception. All the preced-
ing adventures, likewise, had been a medley of persons and objects
familiar to memory.

In front of the door, I stopped to ask myself whether, considering the

late hour (I realized this in the dream), another destination was still pos-
sible. I posed this question to myself just as precisely as in wakeful thought:
still reflecting, I lifted my head, the sky was serene, the stars sparkled.

If certain parts of the dream are easily recognized as having earlier

belonged to various aspects of reality, we can infer that its other parts,
which we cannot find in our memory, are still things we once perceived
in times past.5

It would be hard to admit that one set of visual elements in our dreams

can have a source completely different from the rest, and in any case
we experience everything, at the moment of its unfolding, as a unified
ensemble. There would be no reason to believe that what is strange and
unknown in our dreams is pure invention; we may more probably sup-
pose a progressive “decantation,” whereby the more recent data of mem-
ory cede their place to images that are equally real, but which have reached
us from a far greater distance.

Here, a schizophrenic dialogue: —There is something, but say then what there is? —I don’t
know, but there is something.
Autoscopy (interior seeing), just like certain telepathies and monitions, leads victoriously to
true vision, liberated from optical impositions.

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artmargins 1:2–3

Perhaps, as it proceeds, the dream liberates itself from immediate
memory and comes close to revelation—and this is what is so disquieting
in its development.

Still debating whether to return home, I lifted my eyes again and saw,

right above me, the moon. It is then that a terrifying image struck me,
transforming my dream into nightmare.

I saw our familiar moon in its splendor, but its position was more dis-

tant in the sky. At the same time, it was bigger. Beside it, two small
satellites turned one around the other, like twin stars. It was the sight of
these two celestial bodies that I knew, even then, to be foreign to the sky,
which filled me with a strange anguish, and woke me.

/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /

The image I describe in this dream figures, I believe, at a certain moment
in all human dreams, and seems to belong, though the circumstances
vary, to a collective unconscious—an idea that should not be pursued
along positivist lines. It has therefore the value of a dream type, arising
as it does from these staggering celestial visions that render null and void
more than one grand principle of the moderns.

There exists a cosmological given.
The human being finds itself in a dream, alone, in the agonizing
night of the universe.
It feels, then, a terrible incompatibility between living matter and
the matter of the world.
And this world is huge, cold, empty, black.

/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /

Now, the historical relation toward the world is thoroughly vital and social:
its role is biological in the strict sense. Life within communities tends
first and foremost to obliterate any consciousness of our participation in
the cosmic course. The role of history, even in its most murderous epochs,
is to reassure, to force us to live, to provide a counterbalance to the fear
of the stars.

In dream, the historical given is progressively abolished along with

the disappearance of symbols. As all diurnal residues disappear, as the
oneiric current deepens, cosmic consciousness continues to rise with over-
powering force. Upon waking, as we take up the ties that bind us to
bright-lit day, the more we forget the truth that the dream managed to lay
bare before us. . . . Lightened of its historical and parasitic elements, the
dream recalls to us, obsessively, that before all we are the inhabitants of
a planet and that we live literally in the sky.

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trost | from visible and invisible

/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /

The true point that ties dream and madness is the sentiment of imme-
diate and effective belonging to the world of stars and planets.

In our day to belong in a conscious manner to the cosmos can become,

by various paths, a tyrannical idea: when thought takes itself for its own
object—when it is constantly aware of itself as thought — this idea invades
it and creates, depending on its presence or absence, an ontological
difference between beings.

/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /

In diurnal life, as in dream, the irruption of the cosmological given begins
with a strange disquietude. This is nothing but a veiled and obscure
form of the cosmic, whatever might be the explanation of this phenom-
enon provided by psychoanalysis (no doubt valid in its own sphere). . . .
One would like to define this strange disquietude as the fortuitous meeting
of a familiar object with the cosmic charge that it reflects.

Our consciousness of belonging to the celestial sphere should,

in the future, be incorporated into revolutionary consciousness.

There is an error in believing that one must turn away from this
awareness in order to serve an immediate cause, and in believing that
any attempt to overturn the present conditions of the human world should
put it out of mind.

From Part one: “Shadow tactIcS”

The breath that moves us is absolutely other; the unknown that draws us
cannot be mistaken for a secret; it must not be supposed to exist outside
of us like an uncharted earth that awaits its explorers. It is ourselves,
this unknown—not determined from above, but to be discovered in the
atmospheric halo of our own lives, such as we invent it.

This is not necessarily a matter of devoting oneself to the discovery

of an invisible world symmetrical to the visible one, as black magic pro-
poses, or of setting out upon the traditional stairways of pure esotericism,
but rather of the liberation of the unknown according to exclusively poetic
methods and which, though involving an immense initiatory effort, would
take place outside of any ritual understood as a mode of harnessing cer-
tain energies. And if within the framework of method, to dream is also to
create an antinomy to resolve, in that of poetry, to dream is also to create
the world. By this we see, moreover, that what the psychological, noctur-
nal dream has splendidly accomplished within the universe of determi-
nation, the active reverie can now do within the invisible universe, beyond

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artmargins 1:2–3

all antinomy, opening a passage from written automatism to automatism
dialectically negated.

Once arrived at this point, and to make way for the dreamers who strad-

dle the boundary between nocturnal dream and diurnal reverie through
their negation of the binary—even if they are now engaged in another
struggle—we must reconsider the basic composition of revolutionary
collectives, for an organizational weakness persists across all the modern
movements of emancipation and affects all efforts toward changing the
present state of the world.

In addressing the conflict between knowing and doing, we can use
the vocabulary of psychology to assert that, to varying degrees, two diver-
gent types of revolutionaries compete for dominance over all poetic
development. The first can be called “anarchic”—an attitude formed on
the basis of schizophrenic correspondences—while the second, under
the name of “hierarchic,” appears to conceal a more or less opposed atti-
tude, formed on the basis of an invincible separation between subject
and world. . . . Everything that supposes an acceptance of and final accom-
modation to life as defined by biology, however vehement its initial
refusal; everything that, despite its initial refusal of integration, finally
amounts to affirmation of the social; everything that appears as manifest
content in the dialectic of facts; all this is the work of the hierarchics, around
whom the anarchics come to gather, these latter marked first and fore-
most by their fundamental inadequacy before the very fact of living, though
they draw their energy from the latent springs of the epoch. Thus is the
case for all the great suicides whom we carry within us. . . . In order that
this appalling rivalry find its end, it is indispensable that these two revo-
lutionary types who, often with great purity and clarity, vie with each other
for efficacy in all revolutionary action, be annulled as such. And just as,
in the economic sphere, the value of declassment by far outstrips the prob-
lem of origins, it appears evident that the hierarchic type of organiza-
tion, along with anarchic abandon, must be finally renounced in favor of
a spiritually heightened schizophrenia—one that has finally vanquished
its fundamental clumsiness and unfitness for living in a reversal—a
turning back toward life—that corresponds exactly to that proposed in
the dreamer’s case.

If in this way schizophrenia, within the spiritual order, is able to
negate itself and take up its vital circuit on a higher plane, and is thus able
to negate the stage of real or virtual suicide that in all circumstances
characterizes it—in making life the equal of death and no longer finding

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trost | from visible and invisible

in the latter the only true solution, dilatory and useless as all earthly acts
might seem—only then will the revolutionary will take a leap forward,
without peril of abandonment to one side or the other, only then will the
advent of a true poetic collective become a certainty. . . . With the mas-
sive advent of the turning of thought upon itself, mere psychological mad-
ness, changing its role, will be succeeded by a Sur-Madness, the only
acceptable kind: pure clairvoyance of the mind and spirit, released from
all psychopathological complications.

/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /

Given that an integral part of the responsibility for the generally mon-
strous development of humanity, from deep history onward, falls to
humanity itself—that it is humanity that elevates its tyrants and its trai-
tors—it is not up to us to directly resolve this problem, in which we
nonetheless participate. Insoluble in any case, it would place upon our
shoulders the heavy and distressing burden of our entire evolutionary
past, would oblige us to be its involuntary heir, would cast us into the
redoubts of contradiction, would destroy our sustaining armature. We need
not respond to this diversionist solicitation, nor make any effort, con-
demned in advance, to recover its evasive threads.

As our contract is above all with ourselves, we must, in fact, accept

the present existence of a new spiritual race, and that it is the heir, in
the secular order, of all that was insurgent in the past: of the negators, the
enlightened dreamers and the magicians, of the great lovers, the true
poets, and the rebels, and of all those who gratuitously refused life. It is
only for this romantic, this young humanity that we are responsible, and
only from it can we deduce the existence of a generalized humanity, of a
generalized youth. . . . The beginnings of this new spiritual “race,” first
brought about by a psychic mutation characterized first and foremost by
this turning of thought upon itself—thus by the detachment of the
function of thought from its primordially biological and social uses, in a
moment of heretical and romantic awakening—have only today found
their true resonance.

Thought’s gradual passage from creator of productive relations to
creator of relations gratuitous from the biological point of view—in the
past visible only in brief flashes and exceptions—can at any instant take
a massive form. The poetic movement belongs before all to this passage
and this mutation, but also guides it from afar. The new relationship that
this mutation creates between being and thought—first set in motion,
to use contemporary terms, with the acceptance of the unconscious by the
conscious mind—leaves the rest of our technical, scientific, and critical

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preoccupations in the stone age. The poet, whatever his domain, reveals
himself by this alchemical annulment of the infrastructure, or more
exactly its annulment by way of refusal to satisfy its demands, at the risk
of his life.

/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /

The reversal of schizophrenic suicide into a life-within-life, multicolored
flame ushering the beyond into the present, depends on one essential
condition: a revision of relations between the actors, of the matrix of atti-
tudes and their associated rites, within the revolutionary constellation.

/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /

Revolutionary action, in any future form of organization that it chooses,
must yield to the dreamer, who has pursued the negation of life to the
point that life itself becomes the terrain of his dreams. . . . A movement
will flourish if it has managed to reconcile dream and action, but not
only this: in the poetic sphere, or in any domain that does not seek to imi-
tate other movements in their diurnal efficiency, dream itself is action.
. . . An automatism of action, which can take the form only of a dream
without memory, a diurnal dream, depends for its realization not only on
keeping its proper distance from the obstacle, but on the formation of a
collective within which liberty is experienced immediately as pleasure.
. . . A true method of collective action allows the dreamers the possibility
of outward effectiveness, but for this the method must be truly collective,
and not take the form of a conglomerate in which agitators and utopians
grapple for influence at its heart—for so far this is how, despite much
resistance, the principles of action within the external world have been
conveyed to us.

The real functioning of free thought depends first and foremost on
the purification of internal relations within the collective superego of
revolutionaries who have reached the point of fusion.

The liberation of poets, as described here, would be the equiva-
lent of the unprecedented liberty attained, amid the dynamic equilibrium
of psychic forces, by automatic writing. But first, an utterly new form of
love-friendship must heal the poets’ great emotional wound—a wound
whose origin we cannot place, but which must all the same have arisen
with the first emergence of a separation between self and nonself, with
the struggle of the pleasure principle with the so-called reality principle—
a wound that, before today, nothing could heal except death, supreme
remedy of the dreamer.

TRAnslATIon by CATheRIne hAnsen

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trost | from visible and invisible
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