The dream is political. Dream tactics of anti-oppressive resistance.

Abstract

As Elvio Fachinelli states when discussing the student movement of 1968, the dream can function as a stubborn objection of unconscious desire. The purpose of this article is to show how the dream can be interpreted as a principle of fundamental dissent and under what conditions it can be politically employed as a margin of resistance, as a refusal to be oppressed or even erased by a society that considers itself all-encompassing. Whether this society is the Nazi-Fascist regime, as evidenced by the dreams collected by Charlotte Beradt during the Third Reich, or whether it is capitalist society, as depicted in the documentary "Dreaming Under Capitalism" by Sophie Bruneau, the political power of the dream is not simply consoling or utopian; on the contrary, the dream appears to be radically heterotopic, precisely because it is capable of polemically opening up a potential counter-space that challenges any totalitarian closure.