Dreaming of Egypt: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema

Abstract

ON THE TWENTY-FIFTH OF THERMIDOR (August 12, 1799 on the Revolutionary Calendar) Napoleon, having seized Egypt from both the Mamelukes and the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire, entered what Egyptologists claim to be the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Like his predecessor, Alexander the Great, he asked to be left alone in the heart of the pyramid. When he emerged he was reportedly very pale and impressed and forbade his aides to speak of what had happened. He implied later that he had received an intimation of his destiny, but still refused to speak of it. Even in exile at St. Helena the incident haunted him, but he would say nothing about it: No. What's the use. You'd never believe me.1 But one can imagine what a young general embarked on world conquest in emulation of Alexander the Great might have felt inside the monumental and ancient pyramid of the great Pharaoh Khufu (2551-2528 B.C.). Despite its reputation as a vainglorious tomb for a tyrannical Pharaoh, a legend popularized by Herodotus, there is no explicit evidence that this structure was exclusively a tomb, although that may have been one of its purposes.2 The pyramids have always been admired only if they were first admitted to be evidence of a monumental egotism, oriental excess, and semibarbaric fanaticism. Ancient Egypt and its architectural legacy have consistently been presented as a memento mori to Western eyes, when they have not also appeared as a dream of sensuality and barbarism, a place and a time where extremities of all kinds merge.3 It should not be surprising, then, that Napoleon's apocalyptic revelations should be counterbalanced by more practical considerations: he had calculated that the stone contained in the pyramids at Giza was sufficient to build a wall three meters high and one meter thick all around France.4 Although this calculation was simply a way of appreciating the enormity of the tombs (since the requisite dismantling and shipping of the stones would exceed even the engineering skills of Napoleon), it suggests extreme but related responses to the hazy reappearance of Egypt on the European horizon: romantic revery and imperial domination, metaphysical insight and tech-

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