My where has the time gone?
A simple question plagues me: how does one remember sleep eating?
The question persists in the field on account of the theoretical basis my partner and I have outlined. The basic premise has always been that there is an essential recapturing of a memory informed by the imaginary in the act of sleep eating. Evidence which can be gathered below, particularly in Death Mask’s fantastic bit on Freud and art ultimately predicting the sonambulent consumption of NutraGrain bars, as well as in my own serialized investigation of newspaper reports of Ambien side effects, points to the presence of a repressed spectral primitive past that surfaces in sleep in order to mandate the mass consumption of neophytic foodstuffs. If this is the case, what role can we ascribe to the way in which the sleep eating act is remembered, both by the participant and their helpless horrified teenage sons who look on in horror?
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest
Heidegger’s project in Being and Time is often described as a rumination on the potential contexts of universality. If there is a “being” at all with which we can connect all human consciousness, surely all ideas of fundamentality must spring from this very location in time. Of course, when put in these terms the project looks hopelessly Cartesian, a hopelessness I wish to maintain throughout while simultaneously offering an apologia to those Heidegger fanatics who find the Descartes comparison unbearable.
The man depicted is not Martin Heidegger, ergo, the man depicted is not a Nazi sympathizer
The potential uses of Dasein have been explored in more depth than I care to give them in relation to the discussion of eating and sleeping, but the most important use—outside several references in Encore that Lacan makes to it, usually punny—is Derrida’s concept of the trace; a temporal shift that allows memory to act on signifiers and establish relations of competing subjectivities.
The internet says Lacan really drew this
The importance of this critque, as it were, is that it locates comprehension outside the realm of absolute presence, a myth Derrida cheekily ascribes to Saussure’s original notions of linguistic signification. As shaky as his blame game can get, Derrida is right in noting the supplement embodied in memory—namely, the supplement that makes the whole system of Dasein work.
Quickly becoming my favorite collection of pictures in any YHTALMM post
But if any ontological view of the present needs a supplement, what is the present anyway?
What if instead of present and past in dialectical processes, subjectivity were really a dialectic of past and ur-past, or time and Autre-temps? What if the duality of time and memory, described by Samuel Beckett as “that double-headed monster of damnation and salvation,” were itself only a mote in a larger system of dualities?
Officially my favorite group of pictures for any YHTALMM post
Every memory of the sleep-eating act is therefore a play between the two times in which one can remember. The Ego, then, is only the memory, only the auditor of a speech that has already come before its time. The Id becomes the locus of mythic time, a time of cannibalism and castration that only redeems itself in the unbounded potential for enjoyment. The question of how one remembers sleep-eating may not be the question at all; instead let us ask when.
Posts
