Even the most nightmarish of dreams, which, according to surviving accounts, the great mystics suffered, can be viewed in the light of certain divine connections to which the sleep can entrust himself upon awakening.

Don't be seduced by the title. That's how all this started. Doing my best to support the indie (I also opened a paypal account to buy Rick Harisch's mammoth novel) I grabbed this in Louisville and was soon snaked by the dreaded buyer's remorse. Oh that does sting! I'm sure the recent craze for Magyar letters led to this being translated but most readers will soon be baffled. there's not much there there (tipping a hat to G Stein), but that is an allusion to the Földényi Turn as I note: begin with a quote form Whitman, Stendhal etc and this lament the passing or failure of something. All of this is rhetorical. No one is actually hurt by such. Yet there's a dearth of rigor. he doesn't hide behind the density of jargon as many in the post-structuralist camp have been charged. As a day job nerd I am free to say he's the square smoking a bowl at the party, the one whom you don't want to spend time with. It isn't healthy. You can do without this Hungarian Žižek.

I was ready to abandon this early on but I did eventually like two of the essays. Sleep and the Dream is a meditation on this departure and the narrative we are helpless but to accept. The other one concerned Kleist and the cultural impact of his suicide.

The concluding two essays detailing Artaud and Canetti were interesting but fell short of captivating. That said, I did consider whether the latter's Crowds and Power warranted an approach. Something about he and Koestler, something which glistens when I'm half-turned.

'Those most beset by commands are children. It is a miracle that they ever survive the pressure and do not collapse under the burden of the commands laid on them by their parents and teachers. That they in turn, and in equally cruel form, should give identical commands to their children is as natural as mastication or speech ... No child, not even the most ordinary, forgets or forgives a single of the commands inflicted on it.'

The command is what unites every living being, whether animal or human. Such living beings are capable of survival only if they obey, if they fulfill the rules of the game dictated to them through these commands. If they did not do so they would fall to pieces, be destroyed.

Canetti described the command as that which is by definition evil. And yet, without the command, the world would not remain as it is. That pessimistic historical view, which in Crowds and Power can frequently be sensed, here gains decisive contours. At such moments, one comes across the traces of Canetti's concealed gnosticism. The world (or the cosmos, of which the human being forms as much a part as the animal or inanimate nature) is held together by something which can be designated evil. And yet I may perceive evil only if I have consciousness of the good. What would be this good? - a world in which there were no commands that yet would not fall apart from the lack of them.

Can anything like that be experienced? No, says Canetti. But he suggests that - despite every rational principle to the contrary - such a world should exist. The dictatorship of commands must be shattered, he writes not as a historian or political scientist but with the voice of a preacher:
'We must have the courage to stand against [the command] and break its tyranny. The full weight of its pressure must be removed; it must not be allowed to go more than skin-deep. The stings that man suffers must become burrs which can be removed with a touch.' And until this happens, we will be forced to endure the eternal endangerment of our own individuality; we may exist only as the excrement of power.

Hard to follow at times, but could be a translation issue. Loved the idea overall though.