The Arcades Project - Operi

Hermes, the masculine god. It is characteristic that, in neoclassicism, the muses
who are so important for classical humanism mean nothing whatsoever. More­
over, there is much in Proust that belongs in the contexts of neoclassicism: names
of gods. Also, the significance of homosexuality in Proust can be grasped from
this perspective alone. More generally, the progressive leveling of the difference
between masculine and feminine elements in love belongs in this space. But what
is important above all in Proust is the stake which the entire work has in the
supremely dialectical dividing point of life: waking up. Proust begins with a
presentation of the space of someone awakening.-Where neoclassicism is basi­
cally lacking is in the fact that it builds an architecture for the gods passing by
which denies the fundamental relations of their coming-to-appearance. (A bad,
reactionary architecture.)
It is one of the tacit suppositions of psychoanalysis that a clear-cut distinction between
sleeping and waking has no value for the human being or for the empirical impressions of
consciousness in general, but yields before an unending variety of conscious states deter­
mined, in each case, by the level of wakefulness of all psychic and corporeal centers. This
thoroughly fluctuating situation of a consciousness each time manifoldly divided between
waking and sleeping has to be transferred from the individual to the collective. Once this
is done, it becomes clear that, for the nineteenth century, houses are the dream configura­
tions of its deepest level of sleep.
All collective architecture of the nineteenth century constitutes the house of the
dreaming collective. Pommes de tClTe malades
(1845), Rot/wmago (1862), Gendrillon (1866).