I Desire Before I Exist
Descartes’ famous dream sequence, the gnostic cypher by which all of modernity is made to pass, was brought to Freud’s attention in a letter in 1929 and he responded with a certain degree of patient boredom. He classified the dream as a “dream from above”—that is, made as much from waking thought as from dream—but found some interest in the foreign melon and its charms of solitude, claiming that it represented “a sexual picture which occupied the lonely young man’s imagination”—this, no doubt, anticipates the peach or eggplant emojis, respectively. Descartes’ conflict between angel and demon, dream and reality, reveals an internal conflict of “foreign” desire; so that when he founds the modern subject by dividing uncertainty from certainty, madness from reason, the dream from mathematical reality, he is likewise dividing his repressed desire from the fact of his own existence. From this we may deduce an unconscious correlate to the cogito: I desire before I exist.
Do I dare eat a peach?
