The Margins of a Nightmare

Abstract

In a passage from Beyond Aporia? translated into English as ‘Nightmare: At the Margins of Medieval Studies’, Sarah Kofman relates how an encounter with the work of the medievalist Bernard Cerquiglini ‘induced the return of an entire buried past’, ‘[her] dark ages’. Kofman states that the key to this return lay in an untranslatable Old French adverb of grief, mar, which she understood as having helped generate a cathartic nightmare drawing on recollections of a childhood lived under the Nazi occupation. Approaching Kofman's work in the light of medievalists’ notorious penchant for deconstructive and psychoanalytic approaches, this article argues that despite its intensely personal status, Kofman's nightmare bears traces of an important nightmare of Freud's recounted in his Interpretation of Dreams (1900), one with which she would certainly have been familiar: both dream of their mothers through the actions of human–animal hybrids (Kofman dreams of a bat with a human head, Freud of humans with bird beaks). Beyond this, Kofman's nightmare recalls the role of the dream vision (or visio) in the most famous works of medieval philosophy (for example, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, with the apparition of Lady Philosophy), where dreams aid the dreamer in coordinating a complex interplay between painful personal experiences, the weighty influence of past thinkers, and the impetus to philosophical reflection in the present.