I draw on Derrida's limitless extension of the concept of writing to read Freud on dreams, and to explore relations between words, phenomenal or sensory experience, and life itself. I agree with Wordsworth, Freud, Derrida and Cixous that words are also things and argue that what linguistics recognizes as the sign can be marked, as a sculpted piece of stone might be, by the shaping violence of a force other than language. That opening remains traceable in the text. Dream writing names a lived experience of force: magical in its power, unlocatable in psychic terms, moving between languages, dependent on belief.
Bourgeois, L. (1998) Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews 1923-1997, ed. Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
2.
Browning, R. (1979) Poetry, ed. James F. Loucks.New York: Norton.
3.
Cixous, H. (2005) L'Amour même dans la boîte aux lettres. Paris: Galilée.
4.
Derrida, J. (1967a) De la grammatologie. Paris : Minuit.
5.
Derrida, J. (1967b) `Ellipse', in L'Écriture et la difference, pp. 429-36. Paris: Seuil.
6.
Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
7.
Derrida, J. (1993) Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
8.
Derrida, J. (1995) `"There is No One Narcissism" (Autobiophotographies)', in Points …: Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al., pp. 196-215. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
9.
Derrida, J. (2002a) `Ellipsis', in Writing and Difference , trans. Alan Bass, pp. 371-8. London: Routledge.
10.
Derrida, J. (2002b) `Force and Signification', in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, pp. 1-31. London: Routledge.
11.
Derrida, J. (2002c) `Freud and the Scene of Writing', in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, pp. 246-91. London: Routledge.
12.
Derrida, J. and Malabou, C. (2004) Counterpath: Travelling with Jacques Derrida, trans. David Wills. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
13.
Encyclopaedia Britannica (1962) `Church', in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 5: Cast Iron to Cole, pp. 669-73. Chicago : William Benton.
14.
Freud, S. (1987) Die Traumdeutung. Gesammelte Werke II / III. Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag.
15.
Freud, S. (1999[1899]) The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. Joyce Crick. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
16.
Freud, S. (2001 [1930]) The Interpretation of Dreams, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vols 4 and 5, trans. James Strachey et al. London: Vintage.
17.
Shakespeare, W. (1998) The History of King Lear, in The Complete Works , ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, pp. 909-41. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
