Oneiric Witnessing: Dreamscapes of War
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsReview of “Oneiric Witnessing: Dreamscapes of War”
Summary
The manuscript ”Oneiric Witnessing: Dreamscapes of War” presents a theoretical engagement with Beradt, Bion, Didi-Huberman, Koselleck and other theorists on the phenomenon of dream-sharing, specifically in the context of war and what type of act or address that these acts constitute. The text also presents a dream by Yelyzaveta from the war in Ukraine. The text seeks to contribute to the theoretical understanding of how one should read the acts of sharing and receiving wartime dreams and presents convincing arguments on how one should view these acts.
Significance
The text contains an interesting and important topic, engages in interesting literature and develops interesting theoretical discussions and arguments on how to approach dream records or dream witnessing from war zones. When it comes to the proposed approach on page two, it seems reasonable and as offering a potential contribution to the field of dream studies or cultural trauma theory. However, the text does not use or examine the developed theoretical approach, arguments, or discussions either to examine a material in a systematic fashion or to substantiate this approach or argument. Also, the text does not link its claimed contribution to existing debates in relevant scholarship in relation to which it could show in a convincing way that what it argues is something that the reader can buy. Therefore, it is hard to see the scholarly value or contribution of this specific intellectual reflection or essay since the reader cannot assess the difference it makes to existing literature – how it makes us capable of grasping something new or in a different way about dream sharing.
For example, the author mentions “dominant security discourses”, which could be something that your text could contest. But to show that the clandestine knowledge of dreams reveals “aspects of war experience that are marginalized and evenunintelligible in the dominant security discourses” the author would need to first show what these discourses are, what they claim and how they render other spheres of life during wartime invisible, and that no one else has in fact contested them before you (or, alternatively, show how they have been contested thus far, and that you contest them in a novel way). Even if the author would do so, however, the reader might still object that this fact, that dreams reveal “aspects of war experience that are marginalized and even unintelligible in the dominant security discourses” seems obvious. Why is the foregrounding of dream records as clandestine knowledge important? The author needs to show to the reader that dream records, understood in your specific way, makes us grasp war experiences or security or something else that is important to some field in a new or different way (and show this difference in contrast to that field).
Another possibility would be for the author to substantiate his/her theoretical arguments through a more systematic engagement with dream record material. There is Yelyzaveta’s shelter dream, which is a promising material. However, rather than systematically developing the argument/analysis through this material and other, similar material, the author moves on to add other theoretical scholarship based on other cases and to discuss those theories, building more layers on your theoretical approach without reaching the stage of substantiating it or using it to read a material. The author needs to show the reader that his/her reading and argument are convincing, and this needs to be done through some kind of methodology and research design that enables us to see how the author develops the reading and how the author draws conclusions, and, importantly, how this makes a difference to existing discussions on dream sharing, dream witnessing, security discourses, or other literature that the author wants to contribute to.
The author writes: “moments when consciousnesses and rationality lose their controlling grip of the subject, is just as important for spaces of appearance, collective action, thinking and historical judgment”. This seems reasonable, but again, what does it mean that they are “important”. It seems that someone says otherwise. Who says otherwise? Somehow, this importance needs to be shown for the reader in contrast to other ways of claiming how we should understand moments when consciousness and rationality are lost to buy the argument.
Later the author writes: “Following Beradt, I will argue that dreams render visible marginalized and unintelligible aspects of war experience, hovering, as they do, at the threshold of knowledge and non-knowledge, and that approaching dream sharing as a testimonial practice means recognizing in it expression of the dreamer’s political agency.” Again, this is plausible, but you would need to show, by reading some material, that this is the case and also show why this is important (because some other literature claims the opposite or overlooks this aspect).
In the reading of Yelyzaveta’s dream record, which offers promising material, the author engages in an important material. However, the reading lacks systematicity and it is unclear what the goal of the reading is. As I proposed, I think that the author should either use the proposed theoretical approach to examine a material more systematically or use a material to substantiate the theoretical argument.
Line 189 to 207 offer more interesting passages as these lines engage in how dreaming is related to insecurity, sheltering and vulnerability and could thus be connected to literature on this topics. I think these passages offer a glimpse of how the author could make a contribution to existing discourses on security, protection and embodied experiences of war, by showing how the subject, through the agency of dreaming, handle insecurity. Why not seek to contribute to the existing debate on “war as experience“ (Sylvester 2012; 2013) and the affects and emotions in war debate (Ahall & Gregory (eds.) 2015)?
In one passage the author writes:
“Scholarship in cultural trauma theory and in philosophical discussions of testimonial ethics of intersubjectivity have been preoccupied with witnessing as attestation to what cannot be seen and what is thus ‘beyond recognition’ (Oliver, 2015: 483; see also Oliver, 2001). Pertaining to traumatic memory, such witnessing points to a breakdown of representation through affect, silence, and gesture (see Felman and Laub, 1991; Caruth, 1996; Ball, 2000; Felman, 2002; removed for peer-review; 2013; Atkinson, 2017; Caruth, 2017). My concept of oneiric witnessing approaches wartime dreams reports as testimonial practices within that non-juridical and non-representative trajectory.”
This could also be a possible field for the contribution. However, then the reader needs to know what difference your approach makes to his field and its claims (which need to be developed). What can be grasped about dream sharing in war zones through your concept that existing approaches overlook?
More generally, I buy most of the theoretical claims, or the build-up of the theoretical approach, throughout the text. Still, I want to see them put to work or substantiated through a more systematic reading of dream records. I want to see them related to some existing literature or debate where one can grasp the difference that they make to the claims in this literature. For example, what you write on lines 234-255 is plausible, but the reader wants to see these claims substantiated or put to work in a reading, not only presented. For example, if you could show that existing literature on “the vulnerability and fragility of life and of the body in the face of technological warfare” misses out on the agency and specific knowledge of dreams, then you could substantiate your arguments through a reading of for example five dream records (four ones added to Yelyzaveta’s dream) through which you show to the reader how this is the case. Or you could contest some existing way of reading dream records or some dominant ideas in “cultural trauma theory”, for example Beradt’s view (this is only an example) by reading five contemporary dreams from Ukraine.
For the reasons stated above, I do not see part 3 and 4 as adding more substance to the article, other than adding layers to the theoretical argument or approach, which, however, is never substantiated through a reading of material or by engaging in a proper, theoretical argumentation about dreams. The presentation of Beradt’s work or Bion’s, for example, does not constitute such a substantiation. They have a more essayistic character.
In conclusion, you write:
“By arguing that sharing wartime dreams with others and reading, or listening to, these dreams are relational practices with both political and ethical implications, I conclude that these nocturnal records, offered and entrusted to others as a form of war testimony, require that we rethink and reevaluate the place of dreamlives in political community and acknowledge dreams’ heuristic and critical possibilities. Viewed in the light of Beradt’s conception of dream records as seismographs of violence and terror, Yelyzaveta B.’s dream is not a representation of war, but an enactment of its subjective experience. Making her dream visible part of public records of war is not akin to a presentation of an object, but, as I have argued, to confiding a secretive and clandestine knowledge. In turn, Bion’s psychoanalytic perspective has been important to understand that by accessing that material the reader comes to occupy an ethical relation to the dream. Bion’s notion of ‘dreaming-with’ throws the relational perspective on dreams as testimony into relief by presenting dream receptivity to an act of lending one’s own imaginative and thinking capacity to help dream the undreamt. Accessing dreams of people affected by mass violence is bound with an address to shelter the dreamlives of others.”
For the reasons given above, I see this conclusion as a possible introduction after which you could read a material (3-5 dreams from Ukraine for example) systematically to substantiate your arguments – showing to the reader in a convincing way that they enable us to see dream sharing in a better or novel way (say something new in relation to claims in existing literature on wartime dream sharing or on dreams of people affected by violence).
General comment
What is “bearing witness to war”? It seems that you treat the notion of war as given. You may need to reflect upon not only acts of witnessing, addressing, etc. (which you do) but also on “war” as something that is not given, or at least debated, as an object of knowledge or reality. See, for example, Bousquet et al. 2020 “Becoming War” and the special issue on that topic.
In summary
In a peer-review publication, we are interested in adding new knowledge to existing knowledge. What you develop or argue will only have a significance in relation to the claims and arguments in existing debates, knowledge or literature, which you, at best, will seek to revise or add something new to, to some extent. By contrast, if you write an essay, you may develop some interesting thoughts simply because it is interesting. Since this is a peer-review article, you need to 1) develop the claims of the debates or literature that you disagree with or find insufficient to make sense of a certain phenomenon (war, security, dream witnessing, embodied experiences of war, etc.) 2) insert your argument in relation to these debates to show that you address something new or not yet done that could show something else 3) show in a systematic reading/fashion how your argument or approach, when applied to a material or when substantiated through a material (Ukrainian dream diaries or exhibitions), becomes a relevant addition to these existing debates, concepts or approaches 4) summarize your contribution in conclusions and point to how your contribution has created a starting point for additional discussions and research.
Final comment
Again, I believe that the text treats an important and interesting topic, that the theoretical arguments seem convincing and that the theoretical texts that you engage in are relevant and well-read. And the material of dream records, if extended, seems promising. The text is also, overall, well-written. However, for the reasons stated above, the text needs a major revision.
Author Response
In regard to reviewer 1, I thank them for their lengthy and careful engagement with my submission, and for their efforts to help me improve and clarify my argument, for which I am most grateful. I agree with the academic editor that their critical assessment of my submission is based on a fact that we approach problematic of dreaming from very different methodological angles: mine is not an empirical or scientific study of dreams (which is why I have submitted it to a theoretical humanities journal, rather than any journal in critical dream studies). As such, I approach dreams as kind of ‘texts’ that, I propose, as recipients and listeners we can ‘read’ – this is precisely the core insight and major innovation proposed by Beradt in The Third Reich of Dreams. The academic editors articulates it clearly when they make a distinction between an essayistic engagement with the problematic of dreams (my submission) and ‘a research article’ (an approach the reviewer mistakes my submission for). This is not because I consider a scientific approach to dreams and dreaming invalid (on the contrary), but because my argument is based on a premise that it is possible and worthwhile to also have a more interpretative, humanities-based, essayistic approach to dream-life. I am by no way alone in that approach.
Reviewer 1 asks about my reference to “dominant security discourses” which they find confusing, and I have deleted that phrase. I am not trying to make a contribution to security studies, and this phrase was meant loosely, not as a reference to specific field of study. I have merely meant that in reports and accounts of war (journalistic, popular, scholarly) dreams are hardly ever mentioned or considered relevant for understanding the way war impacts those who experience is as civilians or as militants. I have removed “security” and have rewritten the clause.
As regards other dreams from the war in Ukraine, I have made it clearer in my corrections that I have selected one dream from a broader archive of dream collections and have made more explicit references to works where these dream discussions can be found. But it is also important to emphasize that the reason why there is only one dream discussion in the article is because of the space it takes to attend properly to all its richness and nuance. I do not just want to mention other dreams, but insist that it is important to carefully unpack them as texts and for that my submission would go way above the standard article length. In a way, one could say this is a methodological choice to only focus on one dream, because the argument I make with Bion about the receptivity of dream-lives.
Regarding the point that the submission takes the notion of war ‘as given’, it is of course the case that there are different kinds of war. I am not convinced that it is possible, or desirable, and certainly has not been my objective, to create a kind of typology of war dreams according to the type of war. What I have made clearer is that this inquiry is not a study of war; it follows closely an understanding and historical examples of war in relation to three texts (a dream from the all-out war in Ukraine, Beradt’s account of dreams preceding WWII, Bion’s experience of WWI). The submission is not a study of war; it is a theoretical analysis of thinkers who have posited a relationship between collective violence and dreaming. Having said that, I have developed more the section that explains how Bion understood ‘war’ theoretically and historically, and hope that this suffices.
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe article has two commendable merits: firstly, it succeeds in showing -creative and robust at the same time- the critical potential of dreams to achieve interpretative access to traumatic situations of historical experience. Secondly, it offers an enlightening conceptual analysis of two heuristic strategies for approaching oneiric materials that is a great contribution to the social sciences. The article is stimulating, and honest and solid written, so I can strongly recommend its publication. However, I would like to comment on two key topics, which could perhaps be considered for further research.
On the one hand, the text could go further in assessing the limitations of the heuristic tools it analyzed, mainly cultural criticism and psychoanalysis. The analysis of Charlotte Beradt and Didi-Huberman, as exponents of the cultural approach, and that of Wilfred Bion, of the psychoanalytic approach, is deep and solid. Still, it lacks sufficient consideration of their shortcomings and black spots of what dimensions and understandings of the oneiric material are lost in each of these perspectives. I think it would be interesting to include a critical view of the limitations of both perspectives in order to think about their comprehensive complementarity.
Secondly, it would be interesting to know more about the potential of these approaches to produce subjective agency. The article asserts the productivity of these approaches, not only as a form of understanding but also in restoring agency to traumatised subjects, but little is said about how this would be possible, how the subjects' self-understanding would be produced after going through the history and interpretation of their dreams, either in terms of cultural critique or psychoanalytic. Would this analysis be productive in terms of - overcoming and/or reacting the trauma, in terms of building community bonds and reciprocity, or in terms of making the unconscious conscious? Which practical consequences would the “hospitality” of listening, which the article proposes towards the end, have for the dreaming subject? Towards the end, the author offers possible answers and issues to this question. Still, these comments are not systematic enough and offer few empirical clues to account for such a central problem.
Otherwise, I congratulate the author and would like to say thank for allowing me to read it.
Author Response
In regard to reviewer 2, I was certainly very pleased to find such a sympathetic reader, and also thought their questions were highly pertinent. I thank them for their insightful engagement with my submission and for their generosity. I have tried to go some way, to the extent that I have been able, in the direction of reflecting on both limitations of the proposed approach (in the conclusions) and on the impact of the receptivity to war dreaming on subjective agency of the dreamer, primarily by linking it more explicitly to the discussions of civic nationhood and the concept of ‘dream-people’.
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe author has now added some references to the field of dream-sharing as an “affective witnessing”.
However, it is unclear: is the text an attempt to examine if it is an “affective witnessing” or does this the proposed notion of oneiric witnessing contest “affective witnessing”? Affective witnessing needs to be unpacked for the reader to understand this.
The author claims that dreams “grants their readers and listeners access to knowledge that is not often part of the dominant journalistic, popular and scholarly discourses of collective violence”. 1) what are the claims or representations of these “dominant” discourses? This needs to be shown more clearly to the reader.
Page 7: “My concept of oneiric witnessing approaches wartime dreams reports as testimonial practices within that non-juridical and non-representative trajectory.” How? How does your concept add something new that this field overlooks?
In the conclusions, it seems that Ogden (2003) is an important reference, a starting point for the author. The author needs to state clearly in the introduction what Ogden claims and how his/her approach differs from or builds upon Ogden.
You write: “this article has thus probed the philosophical and cultural dynamics of dream-sharing and publicization of oneiric archives” What does that mean? What is a philosophical dynamic?
The stated below (quote) needs to come already in the introduction, whereafter you show how your approach adds something new, beyond this, and later re-connect to it in the conclusions and repeat your contribution and its implications for relevant scholarships/fields:
“The importance of these oneiric archives lies partly in the fact that they offer an important counterpoint to the cultural material that has dominated representations of Ukraine in the Western media and discourses in the wake of the 2022 invasion. The dominant narratives frequently emphasize the effort, intensity, action and bodily animation involved in national defense, solidary work, volunteering, and humanitarian assistance during wartime, depicting bodies in motion and on the move [references to articles, news, literatur etc. here please] As such, attending to records of dreams and dreaming creates reflective and contemplative possibilities that might be foreclosed by the primary focus on action and activity structured by demands of war’s urgency (see also Zolkos 2024). One of the core motifs of these dominant narratives has been that of Ukrainians as ‘political peo-ple’.x Among others, Timothy Snyder (2022a; 2022b) has insisted on the constitutive civic and participatory dynamics in the political becoming of a people, arguing that the broad pub-lic involvement and solidarity work in Ukraine in the aftermath of the 2022 invasion, exem-plifies a performance and a practice of political people. Thus, he argues (2022b), being a peo-ple is “about what you do every day, […] as a collectivity which exists […] because it is di-rected towards some kind of a future”; it is based on “asserting its own existence day to day.”
Reflecting in this context on the relevance of dreams and dreaming ‘from the frontlines’
By having this in the introduction, you can connect it to this, which should be mentioned after it:
1) “I ask whether the dream sharing initiatives developed in Ukraine post-2022 are a form of affective witnessing to violence and the way it imprints the psycho-social domain” – Why? Connect to the above. This needs to be clearly stated. The best way of doing so would be in contrast to other, less convincing approaches, or to show that your approach is entirely overlooked and therefore needed
2) “I argue that recording, documentaing and publicly sharing
wartime dreams can be productively thought of as a testimonial practice that offers unique iinsights into the subjective impact of violence in two respects” – Why is this important? Again, see above.
3) Is it because: “it helps them endure and withstand an unbearable and shattering experience”? If it is, then you need to clarify that and how it contributes, in a new way, to that research.
After the introduction, you need to show how dreaming as an inactive action makes a difference in how we understand and represent people’s experience during the war. Through your material you can thereafter substantiate your claims (1, 2, 3). In the end, in the conclusions, you need to summarize how you did substantiate it, the results of your inquiry and develop the implications of your findings/substantiated approach.
I do not see how your approach and what you have discussed “raises the question of on the formation of political people through a democratic ‘dreaming-together’.”
What is an “analytical-critical platform”? I am not convinced that this has been created, nor the value of it for research (it seems vague).
Final comments
Based on the above comments, my main comment is that the contribution to a relevant research field and to clearly developed debates is still unclear or even lacking, even if, based on my comments, this could now become clearer. The text has overall become more solid, but it needs to stick to what it can and does show or substantiate and underpin it through a clearer overview of the literature it wants to contribute to, of the claims or representations of “dominant discourses” and by showing how it shows something else, and by avoiding vague notions or bold claims. Given these comments, the text needs to be revised.
Author Response
Thank you for feedback and for further engagement with my text. Below please find responses to specific comments:
Comment 1:
The author has now added some references to the field of dream-sharing as an “affective witnessing”.
However, it is unclear: is the text an attempt to examine if it is an “affective witnessing” or does this the proposed notion of oneiric witnessing contest “affective witnessing”? Affective witnessing needs to be unpacked for the reader to understand this.
Response 1:
I have introduced references to the scholarship on affective witnessing to situate my concept of oneiric witnessing in relation to it and to explain better some of its characteristics, such as the importance of emotions and affect in the practice of dream-sharing and that it is a relational and addressed activity.
I have hopefully made that clearer in the introduction (lines 31-34 and 51-60).
Comment 2:
The author claims that dreams “grants their readers and listeners access to knowledge that is not often part of the dominant journalistic, popular and scholarly discourses of collective violence”. 1) what are the claims or representations of these “dominant” discourses? This needs to be shown more clearly to the reader.
Response 2:
I have decided to remove this claim because it continues to cause controversy. My point is not that specific elements of the war experience are missing in these discourses (which then appear in dream-sharing); my intention here is to amplify the point made by the scholarship on dreams relevant to this article (Beradt, Didi-Huberman, Koselleck) that dreams and dream-images have a curious relation to our social and political realities in that they point to and intensify understanding and knowledge might be nascent, hidden or ‘larval’ (still developing). Instead of the previous statement, I have quoted and referred to Didi-Huberman, which hopefully makes clear my own intention (lines 120-124).
Comment 3:
Page 7: “My concept of oneiric witnessing approaches wartime dreams reports as testimonial practices within that non-juridical and non-representative trajectory.” How? How does your concept add something new that this field overlooks?
Response 3:
I have re-written and expanded the paragraph to explain and answer the reviewer’s question (lines 267-304).
Comment 4:
In the conclusions, it seems that Ogden (2003) is an important reference, a starting point for the author. The author needs to state clearly in the introduction what Ogden claims and how his/her approach differs from or builds upon Ogden.
Response 4:
The conclusions are not more indebted to Ogden than they are to other scholars working in the field of Bion’s psychoanalytic theory (Ogden is of course part of that discussion, but equally important for my article, if not more, has been the texts by Schneider, Souter, Brown, Alford, and others). Ogden is mentioned only once in the conclusions, following this clause “[…] dreams are being recognized as psycho-social repositories of insight and knowledge—and a mode of thinking and metabolizing sense impressions into components of experience.” I am quoting Ogden here because the language resembles closely his way of putting it (though it is not direct quotation), but it is a pretty standard and relatively uncontroversial claim in Bionian psychoanalysis. For that reason, I have not introduced any modifications to the text of the article in response to comment 4.
Comment 5:
You write: “this article has thus probed the philosophical and cultural dynamics of dream-sharing and publicization of oneiric archives” What does that mean? What is a philosophical dynamic?
Response 5:
I have rewritten that sentence to make it clearer (lines 568-572).
Comment 6:
The stated below (quote) needs to come already in the introduction, whereafter you show how your approach adds something new, beyond this, and later re-connect to it in the conclusions and repeat your contribution and its implications for relevant scholarships/fields:
“The importance of these oneiric archives lies partly in the fact that they offer an important counterpoint to the cultural material that has dominated representations of Ukraine in the Western media and discourses in the wake of the 2022 invasion. The dominant narratives frequently emphasize the effort, intensity, action and bodily animation involved in national defense, solidary work, volunteering, and humanitarian assistance during wartime, depicting bodies in motion and on the move [references to articles, news, literatur etc. here please] As such, attending to records of dreams and dreaming creates reflective and contemplative possibilities that might be foreclosed by the primary focus on action and activity structured by demands of war’s urgency (see also removed for peer-review). One of the core motifs of these dominant narratives has been that of Ukrainians as ‘political peo-ple’.x Among others, Timothy Snyder (2022a; 2022b) has insisted on the constitutive civic and participatory dynamics in the political becoming of a people, arguing that the broad pub-lic involvement and solidarity work in Ukraine in the aftermath of the 2022 invasion, exem-plifies a performance and a practice of political people. Thus, he argues (2022b), being a peo-ple is “about what you do every day, […] as a collectivity which exists […] because it is di-rected towards some kind of a future”; it is based on “asserting its own existence day to day.”
Reflecting in this context on the relevance of dreams and dreaming ‘from the frontlines’
Response 6:
I have added references to the sentence “The dominant narratives frequently emphasize the effort, intensity, action and bodily animation involved in national defense, solidary work, volunteering, and humanitarian assistance during wartime, depicting bodies in motion and on the move.”
I understand why the reviewer would like me to bring the point from the paragraph in the conclusions to the introduction. However, I do not want to do that because my concluding suggestion about the relevance of dream collections to representations of Ukraine is a reflections about the implications of my argument, not the argument. As I have already stated and explained in response to the first report from the reviewer, this is a theoretical and essayistic paper, not a research paper per se. More importantly, it takes the case of Ukraine (and Ukrainian wartime dream collections) as a point of departure for a philosophical and psychoanalytical discussion of dreams. My background is philosophy, and my contribution is to philosophical scholarship, not sociology or political science. The article is framed not in relation to the war in Ukraine or its representations, this is just a side point; it is a contribution to cultural dream theory by way of developing a concept of dream-sharing as witnessing.
Comments 7:
By having this in the introduction, you can connect it to this, which should be mentioned after it:
1) “I ask whether the dream sharing initiatives developed in Ukraine post-2022 are a form of affective witnessing to violence and the way it imprints the psycho-social domain” – Why? Connect to the above. This needs to be clearly stated. The best way of doing so would be in contrast to other, less convincing approaches, or to show that your approach is entirely overlooked and therefore needed
2) “I argue that recording, documentaing and publicly sharing
wartime dreams can be productively thought of as a testimonial practice that offers unique iinsights into the subjective impact of violence in two respects” – Why is this important? Again, see above.
3) Is it because: “it helps them endure and withstand an unbearable and shattering experience”? If it is, then you need to clarify that and how it contributes, in a new way, to that research.
After the introduction, you need to show how dreaming as an inactive action makes a difference in how we understand and represent people’s experience during the war. Through your material you can thereafter substantiate your claims (1, 2, 3). In the end, in the conclusions, you need to summarize how you did substantiate it, the results of your inquiry and develop the implications of your findings/substantiated approach.
I do not see how your approach and what you have discussed “raises the question of on the formation of political people through a democratic ‘dreaming-together’.”
Response 7:
I really appreciate the reviewer making these detailed suggestions, but as I stated in response 6, these do not correspond to the objectives of the article or the framing, or indeed the conventions of my discipline (philosophy). The aim of this article is to develop a concept. I assume that the reason why the reviewers keeps making these suggestions is because I have not explained myself clearly enough in the introduction. I have rephrased the relevant parts of the introduction and added a separate footnote ii to make the point about the goals and framing of the article.
Comment 8:
What is an “analytical-critical platform”? I am not convinced that this has been created, nor the value of it for research (it seems vague).
Response 8:
I have revised the sentence to make is less vague (lines 595-598), and removed the phrase.
Round 3
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThank you for your answers to the comments and the revised manuscript. Many of the comments have been addressed.
In its current state, the manuscript only requires minor revisions.
Comments:
You criticize sociology or political science, but you frame your text too much as such an inquiry, asking:
”Why are people ‘turning to dreams’ to 27 grapple with, to leave a record of, and perhaps to better understand their own historical 28 experience? Has dream-sharing become one of the ways in which those directly affected 29 by the war bear witness to its psycho-social and cultural impact?” These questions seem to demandi that you need to do interviews. I understand that they are posed more to raise an interest (they are almost rhetorical, which you might also want to avoid), but why not write questions that you actually address in your text?
Suggestion:
Rather than addressing these questions, which would require interviews or ethnographic work, you adress what type of knowledge, address or ”text” that dream-sharing from war constitutes, arguing that it’s a form of affective witnessing, which you thereafter develop theoretically in dialogue with theoretical scholarship. I think it’s important that you remain in this register or situate your contribution there, which, as you argue, is within the humanities.
The same goes for this formulation at the end:
Taking as its reference-point initiatives such as Diaries and Dreams of the War 574
launched and led by Natalka Ilchyshyn, Ihor Kolesnyk and Bohdan Shumylovych, and 575
their students in Ukraine after February 2022, this article has illuminated the cultural and 576
political importance of dream-sharing and of publicization of oneiric archives by draw- 577
ing on diverse resources from continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, including 578Humanities 2024, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 15 of 22
theoretical perspectives on dream-sharing as bearing witness; oneiric seismography of 579
violence and Bion’s notion of ‘dreaming-with’. The goal has been to envision social and 580
cultural practices of collecting and sharing with others wartime dreams as raising both 581
ethical and political questions and possibilities.
The text marked in bold are still too much sociological or other social scientific, ethnographic or other questions that you have not answered or shown exhaustively. Instead of the text marked in bold, you could emphasize that you have shown, or tried to argue for, what type of knowledge it is, what type of address or how we should read these dreams as ”text” and/or affective experience that is shared as stories or other cultural format.
The passage right after this one shows this, when you write:
By approaching dream records and com- 582
munication as a speech act disclosing a ‘clandestine knowledge’ and a secret (one in which 583
the dreamer asks both to be believed and for the dream to be received), I have suggested 584
that the material at hand is akin to seismographic visualizations of war. Of course, 585
dreams as war testimony do not produce a factual or ‘objective’ narrative of war, but (to 586
paraphrase Bion) they make history personal, thus helping recognize war as an event (or a 587
set of events) that is (are) lived and embodied. As Koselleck suggests (2002), dreams are 588
never simply a form of historical documentation of horror, but they are also an enactment 589
of horror. What emerges from reading the Ukrainian dream records is thus a strong sense 590
of dreams as a meeting-point between the embodied psyche and history.
This passage is more in line with what I argue above should be the way you need to frame your contribution and reflect what you do in the text.
Author Response
COMMENT 1: You criticize sociology or political science, but you frame your text too much as such an inquiry, asking:
”Why are people ‘turning to dreams’ to 27 grapple with, to leave a record of, and perhaps to better understand their own historical 28 experience? Has dream-sharing become one of the ways in which those directly affected 29 by the war bear witness to its psycho-social and cultural impact?” These questions seem to demandi that you need to do interviews. I understand that they are posed more to raise an interest (they are almost rhetorical, which you might also want to avoid), but why not write questions that you actually address in your text?
Suggestion:
Rather than addressing these questions, which would require interviews or ethnographic work, you adress what type of knowledge, address or ”text” that dream-sharing from war constitutes, arguing that it’s a form of affective witnessing, which you thereafter develop theoretically in dialogue with theoretical scholarship. I think it’s important that you remain in this register or situate your contribution there, which, as you argue, is within the humanities.
RESPONSE 1: I have revised these introductory passages.
COMMENT 2: The same goes for this formulation at the end:
Taking as its reference-point initiatives such as Diaries and Dreams of the War 574
launched and led by Natalka Ilchyshyn, Ihor Kolesnyk and Bohdan Shumylovych, and 575
their students in Ukraine after February 2022, this article has illuminated the cultural and 576
political importance of dream-sharing and of publicization of oneiric archives by draw- 577
ing on diverse resources from continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, including 578Humanities 2024, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 15 of 22
theoretical perspectives on dream-sharing as bearing witness; oneiric seismography of 579
violence and Bion’s notion of ‘dreaming-with’. The goal has been to envision social and 580
cultural practices of collecting and sharing with others wartime dreams as raising both 581
ethical and political questions and possibilities.
The text marked in bold are still too much sociological or other social scientific, ethnographic or other questions that you have not answered or shown exhaustively. Instead of the text marked in bold, you could emphasize that you have shown, or tried to argue for, what type of knowledge it is, what type of address or how we should read these dreams as ”text” and/or affective experience that is shared as stories or other cultural format.
The passage right after this one shows this, when you write:
By approaching dream records and com- 582
munication as a speech act disclosing a ‘clandestine knowledge’ and a secret (one in which 583
the dreamer asks both to be believed and for the dream to be received), I have suggested 584
that the material at hand is akin to seismographic visualizations of war. Of course, 585
dreams as war testimony do not produce a factual or ‘objective’ narrative of war, but (to 586
paraphrase Bion) they make history personal, thus helping recognize war as an event (or a 587
set of events) that is (are) lived and embodied. As Koselleck suggests (2002), dreams are 588
never simply a form of historical documentation of horror, but they are also an enactment 589
of horror. What emerges from reading the Ukrainian dream records is thus a strong sense 590
of dreams as a meeting-point between the embodied psyche and history.
This passage is more in line with what I argue above should be the way you need to frame your contribution and reflect what you do in the text.
RESPONSE 2: I have revised slightly the conclusions, but I have not removed references to political implications or political relevance of dreams, because I think that the discussion offered in the article speaks also (and strongly) to the political aspect of dream-sharing. This is obvious for Beradt, Didi-Huberman and Koselleck, the three core thinkers engaged with in the article. Perhaps the difference of opinions between the reviewer and me is that I do not think political insight or political reflection is exclusive to the discipline of political science; in my experience, and speaking in more general terms, research in humanities and philosophy has proven more than capable at contributing knowledge about the political.
