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repression the unconscious and a body-ego, which is both social and psychic, are born. According to Laplanche sexuality is not innate, it comes from the other and takes the place of unconscious fantasies long before language and the formation of the ego. The newborn is born prematurely as Lodewijk Bolk thesis of foetalization states, and it is therefore at the mercy of the other, of messages to which the infant cannot give meaning; these messages are therefore repressed to form the unconscious. For Laplanche, de Lauretis writes, psychoanalysis is a practice of translation from the drive to psychic entity (p. 65). The drive is indeed a psychic entity and not, as in Freud, a somatic process. The mind is in a virtual space, not really localized. The drives therefore are in a nomans-land, like in a buffer zone, between the mental and the somatic. The drive is a trope in de Lauretiss language, thus it is the most ambiguous of Freuds terms. Laplanche is less materialistic than Freud, who de Lauretis calls an old-fashioned materialist, not radical enough, who, after having dissociated the drive from the biological and the physiological, returns to the biological. Freuds biologism is evident when he states that the living organism really wants to die. According to de Lauretis, Eros and the death drive are tropes caught in a paradoxical situation. Still, the idea of the death drive is a radical intuition, which for Laplanche is a theoretical exigency explaining compulsion (p.77). For him, theorizing the death drive is a structural necessity on Freuds part, considering his biologism, even though the drive does not stand for the death of the physical organism: Laplanches anti-biologism places the death drivethe result of repressionin the psychic domain. Ultimately, Laplanche thinks that there is only one sexual drive that manifests itself as death drive and Eros, and de Lauretis sees the role of the drive as a consequence of Laplanches theory of the traumatic. For de Lauretis the transition from trauma to the primary process is a form of writing, and the death drive is a virtual space that suspends the certainty of cognition. She writes: My reading of Freuds drive offers no programme [sic], no ethical position, no polemic, only queer figures of passing in the uninhabited space between mind and matter (p.87). While keeping in mind this program, de Lauretis explores the topos of death in Djuna Barness novel Nightwood and in David Cronenbergs film eXistenZthe novel was written in 1936; the film released in 1999. The film speaks in the present tense in terms of virtual reality and biotechnology. De Lauretis dwells on it in order to recover Freuds
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persistent doubt about the inhuman that hunts human reality. EXistenZ, named after a virtual reality game, is an allegory of creative destruction in which Eros and the death drive (which are not biological entities) go hand in hand. The director, who clearly has a taste for the horrid and catastrophic narrative, makes clear that the film is a series of violent metamorphoses filled with the exceptional, the abnormal, the abject (p.91). The new becomes the norm, but creativity is linked to death and destructionan idea shared by psychoanalysis. This is a film that shows that the organic is really something artificial. A summary of Cronenbergs film would demand a long description; suffice to say that the inorganic technology and the protagonists form a game within a game within a game, a mirror construction (p.104). Sexuality for both Freud and Cronenberg is a function of fantasy, not one of anatomy or biology (p. 107) to the point that in this film erotic fantasies are repeated death wishes, so that the film has no real end and leaves the door open to endless repetition. De Lauretis speaks here of a drive towards the inorganic. Her thesis is perhaps too strong; yet the material body has lost its relevance and nature too has become artificial, with the consequence that reality is virtual, no longer material. These considerations bring the author to touch upon economic theories and politics. In fact, de Lauretis draws a parallel between Freud and the economist Joseph Schumpeter, who discusses creative destruction in an economy that shows a cyclic tendency toward crisis and then recovery. By extension, she adds: Freudssomber theory of psychic tendency towards the inorganic may also be relevant to our current technological environment and perhaps useful to read new cultural products such as gender, sexuality and their representations (p.99). This line of reasoning leads to the fifth and last chapter of the book in which de Lauretis gives a Freudian interpretation of Barness Nightwood. The book narrates an interminable, discontinuous and intertextual dark journey where literature and psychoanalysis go hand in hand to explicate a common set of tropes. For Freud, literature and the arts in general were objects of study, useful to unravel and confirm his own ideas about the unconscious. However, this is not de Lauretiss belief. She sees a common, deeper ground linking Freud and literature. She writes: It is my contention that the influence of literary formis responsible for Freuds conception of the psyche as text (p.117). And a text is an open book. This is pure Derrida, and it is surprising that not once does de Lauretis mention Derridas idea that everything is text. De Lauretis sees a coincidence in the fact that Nightwood was written in the historically traumatic 1920s, the same decade in which
Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). She speculates that Barnes knew of Freuds theory of the psyche, since her book shows an homology between psyche and text with regard to their formal modes of operation: primary and secondary processes in the psyche, rhetoric and grammar (or narrative) in the text (p.129). The psyche itself is a text. The reason de Lauretis chooses Nightwood is because it confirms her thesis that sexuality is trauma and enigma, both death drive and life drive. Nightwood is more than a narrative, it is filled with lengthy monologues written in a figural and obscure, archaic style. The novel narrates the relationship between two women, Nora and Robin, that ends in a disaster caused by jealousy. Here the night is a literary topos, a primal fantasy that brings traumatic sexuality and abject degradation; the night is a topos that cannot be con-
narrative construction is the work of the conscious ego. Her thesis is that there is an affinity between the nonhuman structures of language (phonemes, morphemes) and the freedom of language when it facilitates the irruption of the primary process (p.147). However, this freedom is caught in the unfreedom of the unconscious. De Lauretis claims that there is a coimplication of psychoanalysis and literature evident in Freuds work, in the founding moment of psychoanalysis (ibidem). This is de Lauretiss strong thesis, similar to her thesis that language is nonhuman, even though to speak and to write is the prerogative of being human. Given the present state of the world, which is trauma itself, reading Barness Nightwood now helps us to understand where and why we find ourselves in what could be called, without exaggeration, an epochal predicament. z
trolled, repressed or regulated. The disorder of the night is put into evidence, and through it Nora will recognize the power of the past. Nightwood ends in a shocking and enigmatic wayin high drama, due to the radical alterity of the night. Robin is caught in a lurid and obscene scene with a dog that shows that her drive is uncontrolled because of her unachieved symbolization (p.137). But the cause of the trauma cannot be identified. We know only its effects. Robin is a creature of the night close to animality; inhuman, beyond meaning. The nihilism of Nightwood corresponds to the silence of the death drive. Freuds Drive ends with some considerations about fiction that exists in the mode of nonreferentiality as dreams and fantasies do, in a space akin to what Freud names psychic reality. What fiction is to literature, fantasy is to psychic reality (p.146). De Lauretis adds: The interweaving of rhetoric and grammar (narrative) in the writing of a text makes the figuration of literary writing the nearest approximation to the agency of the unconscious, while
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REFERENCES Barnes, Djuna. Ladies Almanack. New York, NY: New York University Press, 1992. ------. Nightwood. New York: New Directions, 1961. De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Derrida, Jacques. Freud and the Scene of Writing. In Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978. Field, Andrew. Djuna: The Formidable Miss Barnes. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1985. Foucault, Michel. Dits et crits. 1954-1988. Edited by Daniel Defert and Franois Ewald. 4 volumes. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. ------. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated and Edited by James Strachey. 24 volumes. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74. Jackobson, Roman and Morris Halle. Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton, 1956. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. London: Tavistock, 1977. ------. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Pyscho-analysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Scheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978. Laplanche, Jean. Essays on Otherness. Edited by John Fletcher. London: Routledge, 1999. ------. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Translated and Edited by Jeffrey Mehlman. Baltimore, MD. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ------. New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. Translated by David Macey. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989.