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 by saying that while his interpretation would remain limited, since he could not question the dreamer, he classified the dream as a “dream from above”—that is, made as much from waking thought as from dream—but that the melon and its charms of solitude 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 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 unconscious 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?
