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.