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.
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