Freud's Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Film

Freud's Drive summary: De Lauretis elucidates a concept of the drives which puts seemingly diametrically-opposed thinkers such as Foucault and Freud into conversation around discussions of Cronenberg's film eXistenZ, and Barnes' novel Nightwood.

Desire in Narrative summary:

Passage for close reading: “As we fully experience the visual and aural pleasure, the solicitation of the scopic and auditory drives that are the lure of cinema and its grip on spectatorial fantasy, identification and desire—death is at work. Cinema is a mirror in which I see myself, an erotic scene laid out for my pleasure, luring me into its fantasy; to the extent that I become part of the fantasy, yes, in that sense, cinema can kill me” (38).

This passage appears at the end of de Lauretis' first chapter, in which she illustrates Freud's theory of drives by way of explications of the films The Hunger, Basic Instinct, and M. Butterfly, exploring how each film postulates a death drive that is inextricable from the sexual. This particular passage concludes the section on M. Butterfly, with a close reading of the final moment of the film, in which Rene, dressed in the Butterfly costume of his own cross-dressing and perfidious lover, commits suicide with a shard of the mirror in which he (or she?) can see his own reflection. After the sentences in question, the page is split by a trio of asterisks, followed by a brief transition paragraph, by means of a turn towards the ways she will incorporate Foucault's “ostensibly anti-psychoanalytic stance” concerning sexuality as a set of power relations, with Freud's stubborn, instinctual drive which the former seems to repudiate. The passage on M. Butterfly, then, constructs the space of a momentary hesitation, a reflection of a mise-en-abîme that thereby becomes one itself. These few sentences open a seemingly heterotopic space of danger and attraction within the text, spiraling deeper and deeper without reaching closure, so that the hall of mirrors must simply be shunted aside by the asterisks, left to reflect potentially endlessly within itself, and always threatening escape despite the reassuring strongholds of the externally-applied border.

In the first of these three sentences, de Lauretis traces a shift from her explication of the final moments of the film, to our own self-identification with the death thus portrayed. The first half of this sentence is lush with parallel clauses, themselves packed with adjectives and prepositional phrases paired by coordinating conjunctions, creating a dense atmosphere ripe for sensory stimulation. The adverbial phrase “fully experience” early in the sentence suggests that there will, indeed, be a range and depth of experiential spaces into which a viewer can fully cast oneself, while the phrase “visual and aural pleasure” assures one of the potentially erotic enjoyment specific to the fullness of these experiences. Through parallel structure, de Lauretis asserts that the source of this fullness is the experience of the film's “solicitation of the scopic and auditory drives” (38), thereby expanding the possible number of drives by subdividing the familiar ones of sexuality and death. In particular, a scopic drive contains connotations not only of visual pleasure, as the counterpart to auditory enjoyment, but of a visuality keyed specifically to one's examination of the other, which serves the viewer as “something aimed at or desired; something which one wishes to effect or attain” (OED). In this way, the scopic, and likewise the auditory drives, as solicited by the film similarly construct the interior spaces of the film as both other and self, where to attain this aim is to incorporate within oneself both the physicality of the other and the directionality of their drive towards death, always already an echo of one's own. Enacting this idea, the first sentence abruptly breaks off at the end into an independent clause which is itself an importation from outside the scope of this book. The volume as a whole starts with Cocteau's phrase “la mort au travail” which, in its translational modifications, has drifted like a fugue to haunt the subtext of de Lauretis' own work. Despite the phrase's powerful effect, the circumstances of her first engagement with it are elided, in favor of a subsequent 1970 gloss by Straub concerning the cinema's ability to “captur[e] time in flight, catch[] death at work” (1). In the sentence in question, then, the phrase hauntingly reappears, both catching and instantiating the act of time looping back on itself . Furthermore, the use of the phrase is no longer quoted, footnoted, or cited as it is in the first chapter. Rather, the sentence erupts out of its larger context as a ghostly outlier, an introjected bit of someone else's thought, which, like the spine in the ego, emerges from the inside out to structure the very space it constructs.

The second sentence, then, enacts both a return to the specificity of the mise-en-abîme of M. Butterfly and also a generalization to the broader mise-en-abîme that attracts from within the heart of film and self. Cinema writ large becomes the subject of the sentence in a move away from the specificity of Rene Gallimard's personal swan song in Butterfly's gown. In contradistinction to this generalizing move, the second sentence shifts away from the first's technical language and inclusive, first-person-plural pronouns to an insistent repetition of intensely individualistic first-person-singular and reflexive pronouns. Likewise, this generality of cinema becomes a specific physical body deployed in space, both a “mirror in which I see myself” and “an erotic scene laid out for my pleasure.” While the latter figure suggests a sexualized body sprawled across a hypothetical bed, with the viewer granted the rights to enjoy it, the former makes the space in which we view this body a radically heterotopic one. If cinema is a mirror, then the viewer themselves becomes the star of the erotic scene which they simultaneously enjoy, in a spatial doubling that creates a vision doubly fantastical, in which the viewer engages as both object and subject. The viewer's figure in the mirror-world of the cinema is granted a fictive agency of enjoyment that the physical self positioned in front of the movie screen lacks, while also being granted the fictive subjectivity of the erotic scene itself, in all its projected deathliness. If the cinema is a mirror, it appears to be a warped one: although it allows one to reflexively view oneself, the “part of that fantasy” that the viewer plays becomes remains undecidable and duplicitous.

The Freudian Body

The Freudian Body summary: Through connections to Mallarmé, Beckett, and Abyssinian bas-relief, Bersani traces psychoanalytic lacunae, demonstrating how Freud's writing simultaneously argues for and undermines a definitional, disciplined reading.

“Three Essays” summary: Freud begins by discussing adult libido through the lens of deviations from the norm, such as object choice or diversion from sexual goal, concluding that perversion is an innate potential of human sexuality, before turning to childhood sexuality, which he asserts begins in infancy with the stimulation of the child's erogenous zones, goes through a latency period in middle childhood, and starts anew at puberty, when the sexual act becomes the constitutive method for diminishing the tension produced by sexual pleasure.

“A Child is Being Beaten” summary: Freud unpacks a common tripartite fantasy of his patients: firstly, the child fantasizes about possessing his or her father's exclusive love, so that the father beats another child hated by the fantasizer; secondly, the child unconsciously places him or herself in the position of the beaten child; and thirdly, the fantasizer consciously replaces the father with another authority figure, and the beaten child by (often anonymous and male) third parties, gaining sexual exciting from the vision of these children being beaten as derived from the original incestuous fantasy.

“Desire and Death” summary: After positing two scenarios for sexual excitation in Baudelaire's verse, one being that of the free-floating desires of shattered selves, and the other a desire for a passionate somnolence akin to sleep or to the diffused rays of a cold autumnal sun, Bersani asserts that the second scenario overcomes the first, so that the final climax of sexual pleasure would be the reduction of insatiable desire to the stillness of death.

“Is the Rectum a Grave” summary: Bersani explores how AIDS/HIV has been portrayed in mainstream media, with reflections on what it means to be mainstream and how the (white, heteronormative family) has come to signify in this discourse, before arguing for the value of powerlessness in sex, and of the ability of sexuality to demean the suspect efforts to redeem it through a pastoralist project.

Passage for close-reading: “The pessimism of Civilization and its Discontents should be an adequate warning: it is the discursive sign of a perhaps suicidal melancholy, the palely reactive aura of a cultural complicity with the power of an anticultural destructiveness, of a murderously childlike need to extinguish the other's fire.” (25)

Throughout this text, I was struck by places in which the voice appeared as paradoxically silent, powerless, or inscrutable, such as the “absolutely impenetrable Law which refuses to allow itself to be obeyed,” (97) which has held a sacred central place in human thought, “from Job to Kafka (97), or the way in which an “author's silent, insistent voice undoes that security of statement by which we can so easily be seduced, and possessed” (67). In this sense, the very act of transmission of the messages of culture were less undermining their content as they were constitutively preventing access to this content, so that the messages are exhibited as empty sets, or at least inaccessible locales, before the temporal possibility of undermining that meaning arose. Since I would like to focus on the empty spaces opened by the most seemingly and intentionally constitutive moves, I chose among these the passage that, by virtue of its position, served as a call for the relevance of an untying, designifying move behind a pair of otherwise disparate texts.

While earlier in the paragraph Bersani has described Freud's attitude towards his own speeches as ambivalent, the sentence in question begins with an assertion of the inherent pessimism in Civilization and Its Discontents. Pessimism, as the philosophical position of assuming the worst about a given situation, itself assumes the potential existence of specific worrisome outcomes, which, if they were to occur, would justify the pessimist in his or her belief in the unavoidable negativity of the situation. The generality of this use of the term, however, forecloses the option of particular negative outcomes, assuming instead an overarching, consistent state of pessimism, a generalized tone of an entire text which definitively fails to point towards a specific situation. The sentence previous to this one hints at specific “pessimistic comments” (24) by Freud concerning the cultural superego's severity, and hence the necessity of a new discourse. In this sentence, however, the placement of “pessimism” at the very beginning, with only the title of the work as its potential object, suggests that, if the work as a whole is primarily pessimistic, then the desire written within it for a new theoretical discourse is subsumed under that pessimism, enacting the very undoing gesture that Bersani is demonstrating within Freud's thought. Positioned at the beginning of the sentence, the word reflects backwards towards the sound of Freud's own “pessimistic comments” (24) which are themselves undermined, while simultaneously echoing forwards towards the “adequate warning” (25) as which this pessimism is, at the end of the clause, finally valued.

This pessimism, we are told, should serve as an adequate warning, the “discursive sign of a perhaps suicidal melancholy” (25). Here, then, the language of the voice and of writing are conflated in service of the negative affect of melancholy. An adequate warning, it would seem, would be one we could hear, in the sense of a shouted telegraphic message which takes its power from the listener's ability to infer the speaker's urgency through the volume and intensity of his tone. The vocality of “warning” is, however, immediately overlaid with textual implications: the content of this warning recedes from us into a “discursive sign” (25), suggesting a conflation of word and image into something like a street sign, thereby occluding the place of the voice through the same gesture that originally gives that voice its force.

Yet the content of this warning, the warned-against outcome which the double layer of voice and text point to, is itself a dissociation, a “suicidal melancholy” that functions to bring the body into the focus of this shifting signification while constitutionally inaugurating that body's breakdown. The pessimism, then, gives voice to a bodily affect, melancholy, which is intense enough to, perhaps, sever the body from the very agency that allows one to give voice. Furthermore, if the temporal hesitations of a potentially suicidal melancholy are the content of the warning, so too is the “palely reactive aura” which parallels the former phrase, with the suggestion of deathly stillness undercut by the agential motion which both “reactive” and “suicidal” suggest.

In the phrase “palely reactive,” the adverb in conjunction with the word “reactive” grants a sense of fluctuating motion, so that the pallor is, through the parallel with “suicidal melancholy,” both the sickly steady-state of death, and a shifting sort of inverse sun. The italicized word “aura” suggests the corona that appears around the sun on a hazy day, as well as the Latin “aurora” for dawn, a double image of filtered light that reaches the observer at the day or the season. The image, then, is one of the eerie after-effects of light, with a gap in signification where the primary source of light should be. Instead, the word “fire” ends the sentence, the only tangible light-source in the passage, and one which is extinguished in order to produce the “reactive aura of a cultural complicity” (25). In between, this last clause is punctuated by words such as reactive, destructiveness, anticultural, murderously, and extinguish, which combine to suggest a breakdown of meaning that is chemical as much as it is semantic, with their combined connotations of an aggressiveness that is specifically nuclear. The simple, sexualized image of the tongues of flame with which the passage ends is undermined by the pale aura of a civilization that glows, a radioactive culture which functions through the fissionable energies of destructiveness, murder, and, as a paradoxical preliminary, suicide. The passage moves, then, through a series of elements that constitutively undo themselves, from the vocal to the bodily to the chemical, suggesting the voice's organic disconnection from the body: separated from its speaker as it extends through time and space, finally concluding in the radically, and radically atemporal, dissociation of an atomic fission.

Life and Death in Psychoanalysis

Life and Death in Psychoanalysis summary: Laplanche reads the large contradictions which form transversals across Freud's work, assuming dialectical force for even the most seemingly adventitious, and recasting aspects of the theories frequently dismissed as either/or into a unified and radically embodied structure.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle summary: Freud posits the death drive, or the impulse of each individual to “die in its own way,” as the titular “beyond” of the pleasure principle, using a speculative methodology that privileges systematically following a line of inquiry to its logical inclusion, and favors the possibility of transforming one's views on the basis of conclusions thus derived.

Passage for close reading: “Now sexuality, in its entirety, in the human infant, lies in a movement which deflects the instinct, metaphorizes its aim, displaces and internalizes its object, and concentrates its source on what is ultimately a minimal zone, the erotogenic zone.” (23)

This passage occurs in the first of six speculative and successive stages of Laplanche's self-described fragmentary analysis of the contradictions inherent in Freud's theories, situated in a discussion of the complication of meanings inherent in the term “perversion.” While a perversion is popularly understood spatially as a “deviation from an instinct” (23), thereby supposing a more specific and salutary aim which the perversion resists, Laplanche suggests that Freud's “dialectic is more fundamental” (23). The physical gesture of the perversion moving aside from the acceptable instinct actually works to catch up the whole of the sexual system, so that the “exception...ends up taking the rule along with it” (23). Radically, Laplanche suggest through this physical metaphor that the exception which seemingly presupposes and proves the rule of pre-existing sexual instincts, instead functions to undermine the entirety of the biological norm, effectively making everything perversion.

The sentence in question is a turn in the argument, in which Laplanche returns to the figure of the child as the limit case through which the role of the perverted can be explored in the lack of a sexual instinct which perversion itself instantiates. The sentence begins with a triple layer of introductory clauses. Initially, the word “now” functions as a transition, temporally designating the sentence as a shift in the argument which moves the discussion towards the reconceptualization of the relation between perversion and instinct. Simultaneously, the “now” functions to temporalize infantile sexuality, placing it in a position of primacy both in the time frame of an individual's life and in the place this seeming exception plays in regard to the rule it subsumes. The appositive, “in its entirety” has a conciliatory character akin to that of the transitional sense of “now,” suggesting a casual reader who must be gently and pedagogically disabused of his misconceptions. This posited reader might, without this interjection, be at risk of considering sexuality as fragmented, or more radically, wholly unlocalizable. This phrase, however, comes immediately before Laplanche lays out the actual location of childhood sexuality, so in conjunction with the presentation of the “now,” the appositive functions to cut off the reader's potential misconceptions before they have a chance to become fixed, effectively suspending them in the infant's radical present.

Despite these introductory clauses' insistence on the totalizable, and hence localizable, body of infantile sexuality, and the promise of tangible location in the verb “lies,” the actual place of this sexuality is constantly shifting: a “movement” rather than a space. Furthermore, the movement of sexuality is itself split four ways: deflecting instinct, metaphorizing that instinct's aim, displacing and internalizing its object, and concentrating its source. In this way, the sentence enacts the very gesture the introductory material seems to warn its readers against: a notion of the sexuality of infants as fragmented and impossible to locate. By forcing the two polarities into conjunction, the sentence functions to undermine both to the same extent, thereby uniting the seeming contradiction into a both/and scenario: human infant sexuality is both entire (and entirely localizable) and also fundamentally fragmentary.

If the sentence as a whole enacts the tension between oppositions which is the hallmark of Laplanche's project, on a still-smaller scale the verb phrases themselves have a similar aim. The first, which asserts that the movement of infantile sexuality is to deflect, contains the suggestion of angled motion away from a linear process of the instinct. This stands in distinction to the teleological impetus of the “aim” which is metaphorized in the second clause, making the instinct paradoxically both primarily direct and tangential. Within the third clause, similarly, the infant's sexuality is characterized as constitutively both displacing and internalizing its object. The spatiality of this conjunction likewise seems impossible, as displacement suggests a removal to an alien location, while internalization suggests an intensity of intimacy seemingly more directly relevant to sexuality. The tension in the seemingly-impossible simultaneity of extrinsic and intrinsic motion is undergirded by the suggestion that one of the constitutive movements of infantile sexuality is that of feeding, in which activity the child does, quite literally, displace the milk from the breast or bottle and physically internalize it within his own body in a motion which requires the regulatory functions of the sphincter and hence actualizes this area into an erotogenic zone. Within the sentence, the phrase “erotogenic zone” itself comes at end of a series of narrowing clauses, from the main verb “lies” to its prepositional complement, then to the restrictive clause with its four subordinate clauses within it, the fourth of which includes a prepositional phrase where “minimal zone” is the object of the preposition, finally concluding with the clarificatory appositive “erotogenic zone.” In this schematic, then, the sentence as a whole actualizes the process of childhood sexuality as the perversion which subsumes the rule, narrowing from its undifferentiated entirety to the specificity of the erotogenic zone in a figure that mirrors the motion of the sphincter.

Melancholy of Race

Melancholy of Race summary: Through readings of Flower Drum Song, The Woman Warrior, M. Butterfly, Invisible Man, Dictée and Twilight: Lost Angeles, 1992, Cheng constructs a theory of racial melancholy, which expands upon Freud by exploring the melancholic relationship of loss and exclusion to possession, assimilation, fantasy and hypochondria.

Passage for close reading: “The internalization of cultural origins as subjective or ontological origins indicates a path to theorize the act of hearing a story, how a story enters us, structures us” (89).

This passage occurs toward the center of the chapter “A Fable of Exquisite Corpses,” in a section where Cheng has been addressing the complex of plaints and losses surrounding the mother and daughter dyad of Woman Warrior. The daughter, as an adult, seeks a “ghost-free” country (88) as a direct complaint against the mother's ghost stories that have haunted her childhood, while Cheng assets that this very complaint unites the two women over a common grief, a loss that the mother chiefly mourns, while the daughter melancholically, and hypochondriacally, repeats that grief, resurrecting the ghosts through her very plea to be rid of them. Cheng argues that the daughter's complaint is actually filed “not on behalf of the mother, but as mother in a kind of endocryptic repetition” (88), a repetition that functions, in part, on the level of the text's complicated and complicit temporality, where the daughter’s childhood and adult recollections and often indistinguishable from each other and from recollections of and from the mother. For Cheng, the “contextual conflation” (88) makes possible cultural transmission of any sort, in that this confusion of voices and temporalities allows the mother to introject into her own loss into the daughter as a kind of alien subjectivity, as the ghost in the machine. I would like to look more closely at the dynamics of these porous bodies, and how a relationship is constructed across the gap of endocryptic functioning.

The sentence immediately preceding this one refers to the mother's attempt to assimilate the daughter into a culture that is not immediately personally meaningful to the latter, so that the focus remains closely tied to the text of the novel in question. This sentence, then, marks a sudden shift to generalized and institutionalized language. The first word of the sentence, in the phrase “internalization of cultural origins,” turns an adjective into a verb into a noun, effectively enacting in miniature the contextual and temporal conflations that Cheng works through in the preceding passages. The generalizing language, and pluralized form, of “cultural origins,” however, moves this conflation away from the singularity of the text, into a condition of possibility for any and potentially all cultural exchange.

“Origins” as the object of the prepositional phrase and hence the object becoming internalized, are here both ontological and subjective. The origin of subjectivity in particular is reminiscent of Lacan's mirror stage, where subjectivity is originated at the moment of self-awareness and self-vision, with the caveat that the self viewed in the mirror is always an embodiment of anticipation, a figure instantiating an asymptotic relationship that looks forward to a state of perfect control that is always already lost to one. This origin is itself temporally complicated, looking both forward to the perfect moment of control and backwards to the Edenic boundedness that is already fantasmic before it is actualized. Yet the “origins” in this sentence are further complicated, both by the temporal and grammatical layers entombing the word “internal” and by the temporal complication of the mother-figure inserting within the daughter, as though it were already extant, a cultural program that is always already asymptotic and contingent, while the abruptly impersonal tone of this sentence universalizes that impossibility of a pure origin t anyone.

The internalization of one kind of origins as another constructs a shifting complex of three impossible-to-locate centralities: the origin of culture, the origin of one's ontological or subjective self, and the situation of those origins internally. If this internalization is cryptic, so too is the path out: the trio of origins align to form a “path to theorize the act of hearing a story, how a story enters us, structures us” (89). “Hearing” a story, as opposed to reading or even writing one, creates the image of the listener as a child figure who needs the guidance of an adult reader to guide their affective responses through a story's structure, an act which becomes doubly receptive through both the ears and the imagination. Through this verb, the reader of Cheng's text, who has been able to insert their own cultural introjection into this impersonal sentence, takes on the place of the daughter from Woman Warrior, listening to a story that constructs both temporality and culture within them.

If we must be structured as children in order to accept this internalizing story, the story itself also, seemingly, structures the listener/reader as adult. The last two phrases of this sentence shift abruptly from the impersonal, universalizing tone of the early sections to an intensely personal—and plural—intimacy. The verb phrase “enters us” makes the story an active, penetrative agent, inserting itself in a sort of sexual paradigm into our bodies. If the earlier part of the sentence allowed a reader to insert themselves into its rhetoric thanks to its generality, the “us” here forces the reader to personalize and literalize that relationship, suddenly making this story, both Woman Warrior and Cheng's own text, force themselves intimately upon our bodies in an act of constructing a cultural identity of which we may not be a part. In this way, the final verb phrases shift the reader, the recipient of cultural assimilation, into a position both as sexual object and maternal figure. If the story “enters” our, and the narrator's “vulnerably porous” (89) bodies, that very porousness incorporates spaces that the story can “structure” much in the way that a fetus changes the structures, chemistry, responses and function of the maternal body. Here, then, the story inserted within the body becomes an exquisite corpse, in the sense of incorporated cultural memories that cannot be assimilated, but also a sexualized and generative actualization of the relationship between generations, structured through the penetrative power of story.