"Toward the Life that It Is Preparing": Dreaming and Fabulating as Critical Arts

Abstract

The early Foucault was strongly interested in the work of the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, and in particular his view on dreams. For Binswanger, the dream is the result of an imagination that is not merely the expression of hidden desires or repressed memories, but the dreamer’s active preparation of a possible future. Foucault would soon dismiss Binswanger’s approach as still too uncritically normative, and lacking a historical perspective on the modes of subjectivation. Nonetheless, the transformative potential of the imagination would continue to fuel Foucault’s philosophical practice. This future-oriented, speculative aspect of Foucault’s criticism can be compared to contemporary post-critical practices like Donna Haraway’s speculative fabulation. These practices want to challenge the status quo of academic critique, and confront the Humanities with the urgent task to examine and develop new modes of existence. Many of these post-critical practices, like Haraway’s, seem to take the cue from Foucault’s antihumanist stance. But what is remarkably absent is Foucault’s later focus on techniques of the self, by which an individual develops an aesthetics of existence. While Haraway makes clear how modern critical theory neglected the other-than-human world, Binswanger’s Daseinanalyse, revaluated through the lens of the later Foucault, shows how the experience of this other-than-human world cannot be fully separated from an individual’s imagination.