Oscillations of Literary Theory

The Paranoid Imperative and Queer Reparative

A. C. Facundo

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781438463100
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Oscillations of Literary Theory offers a new psychoanalytic approach to reading literature queerly, one that implicates queer theory without depending on explicit representations of sex or queer identities. By focusing on desire and identifications, A. C. Facundo argues that readers can enjoy the text through a variety of rhythms between two (eroticized) positions: the paranoid imperative and queer reparative. Facundo examines the metaphor of rupture as central to the logic of critique, particularly the project to undo conventional formations of identity and power. To show how readers can rebuild their relational worlds after the rupture, Facundo looks to the themes of the desire for omniscience, the queer pleasure of the text, loss and letting go, and the vanishing points that structure thinking. Analyses of Nabokov's Lolita, Danielewski's House of Leaves, Findley's The Wars, and Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go are included, which model this new approach to reading.

CHAPTER ONE

The Death Drive and the Life Drive Revisited

The monument of psychoanalysis must be traversed—not bypassed—like the fine thoroughfares of a very large city, across which we can play, dream, etc.: a fiction.

—Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 58

I. “To Push” the Drives:
Sigmund Freud’s Productive Speculations

Contrary to debates in queer theory explored in my introduction, the paranoid and the reparative are not manifestations of drive and affect. Rather, they are expressions of the conflict between the life and death drives. This chapter formulates a theory of the life drive and explores the historical attraction of the death drive in critical theory. My story of the drives underpins the readings in the subsequent chapters. As the story goes, Freud theorizes the drives in 1920. In doing so, he confuses two types of binding: economic and dynamic. Both definitions of binding, which I detail below, are at play in both the death drive and the life drive, but this point is not yet clear when Freud was writing. Because the economic definition of binding lends itself more readily to metaphors of cultural critique, Horkheimer and Adorno and then queer theory’s paranoid imperative employ the economic metaphor. The Frankfurt School theorists attribute extreme economic binding of Enlightenment to the death drive. Conversely, queer theorists associate economic unbinding (undoing) with the death drive. As my analysis will explicate, Bersani unwittingly reintroduces the dynamic mode of binding in his theorization of how the sexual operates in artistic representation. Bersani implies that the self-shattering effects of art necessitate the life drives of signification. Jacqueline Rose and Winnicott each discuss the creative potentials for epistemological crisis, suggesting that the economic unbinding of reified narratives of certainty is bound up with the dynamic binding of signification: that is, the production of new associative links and an intimate engagement with discursive modes. Sedgwick introduces a reparative reading practice as an alternative to the paranoid critique that dominated queer theory. But the reparative turn itself resulted in a split, a crisis of knowledge within the field, a crisis that Rose identifies as the grounds for creative thinking.1

My book’s own reparative project reconciles the push of the drives with their reparative sublimation into aesthetic forms. This current chapter sorts out the roles that economic and dynamic binding play in processes of thinking and reading; the book explains queer theory’s attraction to negativity and offers the possibility of life-driven futurity through engagements with language. The attachments that unfold out of queer reading are akin to the movement of love.

Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) constitutes the theoretical basis of the book. I return to this text repeatedly due, ironically, to a fascination with the concept of the repetition compulsion and the myriad effects it holds for psychic reality. My reading of Freud is less a search for the ontology of the drives than a perusal of strange moments and apparent contradictions in his dialectical thinking process, which works through the opposition of the life drive and the death drive. These contradictions ripple throughout the historical employment and development of the drives up to the time of queer theory. Although Freud reconciles the concepts of binding and unbinding in relation to the drives more decidedly in later works such as An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), his thinking in Beyond the Pleasure Principle introduces slippages that lend themselves to the theorization of queer as it becomes defined in terms of the drives. My reading proves two seemingly contradictory claims: the death drive involves binding and unbinding; the life drive involves binding and unbinding. In order for these claims to make sense together, I will explain what I identify as two types of binding.

Freud opens Beyond with the economic factor of the psyche as his main concern; that is, he thinks about how the psyche manages quantities of excitation that it receives from the external world and from within. By the conclusion, he veers reluctantly from his economic model. Freud begins his book with a review of the two principles of mental functioning: the pleasure principle and the reality principle. He defines pleasure in economic, quantitative terms as a diminution of excitation and unpleasure as an increase in excitation. Counterintuitive to the twenty-first-century reader, Freud defines pleasure in negative terms, as an avoidance of pain, or the maintenance of net quantity of energy in an organism. Whereas he distinguishes these two principles quite definitively in his earlier 1911 essay, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Psychic Functioning,” the pleasure and reality principles become more closely linked in Beyond as both serve to satisfy a principle of constancy, in which the organism seeks cathectic homeostasis. The reality principle involves the compulsion to repeat unpleasurable experiences as an adaptive measure, when the organism exposes itself to agitating stimuli in order to gain an active position toward mastery and desensitization.2

Because Freud speculates about more primal psychical functions than the pleasure principle, he does not focus on the speaking subject in this text but rather turns to unicellular and multicellular organisms. For the organism’s survival, Freud ventures, protection becomes more vital to survival than the reception of stimuli. Freud asserts that the mere purpose of reception to stimuli is to “discover the direction and nature of the external stimuli” (BPP SE 31). By extrapolation, the whole of human experience is reduced to direction and degree of danger. In order to maintain homeostasis and gain pleasure, the organism attempts to transform mobile energy, or free-flowing cathexis, to quiescent or bound energy. Stimuli from the external world arrive in the form of subdued samples in small quantities, highly mediated by the organism’s defense mechanisms. The receptive cortical layer, which he calls the perceptual conscious (Pcpt-Cs), develops a shield that is “baked through” with external stimuli such that it undergoes a permanent structural modification: “its outermost surface ceases to have the structure proper to living matter, becomes to some degree inorganic, and thenceforward functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli … By its death, the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate” (BPP SE 30).3 The integration of death into the structure of the organism is necessary for the prolongation of life.

Freud counters his initial observations about the principle of constancy by discussing patients who suffer from traumatic neurosis and whose dreams contain a wish to repeat unpleasure that has been forgotten and repressed. He explores another effect of the compulsion to repeat that contradicts the purpose of the “Fort-da” game,4 when the compulsion overrides the pleasure principle and produces a repetition that cannot possibly yield a net gain of pleasure. Freud remarks on the unconscious character of this compulsion: “We are much more impressed by cases where the subject appears to have a passive experience, over which he has no influence, but in which he meets with a repetition of the same fatality” (BPP SE 24, emphasis in original). The cortical shield that protects the receptive elements of the conscious system defends against the external world only. Those unpleasurable excitations that arise endogenously from the unconscious during a compulsive repetition of repressed traumas encounter no protective defense system. The best that the organism can do in this case is to externalize the endogenous stimuli through projection and defend against it as if it originated from the outside, a measure that does not ultimately prevent a repeated experience of the trauma.

The unconscious repetition of traumatic experiences threatens the organism’s structure with unbound energy. Such potential threat allows Freud to posit a primal self-destructive tendency. Freud postulates a conservative element in the drives, that the drives tend toward an earlier, inorganic state: “If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ ” (45–46, emphases in original). The condition of this sentence is strange given its radical and absolute conclusion: all life aims toward death. His readers cannot “take it as truth that knows no exception” that living organisms die for internal reasons as opposed to external ones. He rather implies that, left to its own devices in an ideal environment, the living organism will die due to a failure of its own metabolism. The organism strives toward reproducing such ideal environments by avoiding the dangers of the outside world so as to die in its own way. The compulsion to repeat acquires this radical function to return to an inanimate state, from the inside out, not vice versa. The more organically complex the species, the more complicated the detours developed toward the aim of death.

In this moment, the death drive takes precedence and becomes the theoretical seed for the twentieth-century question of subjectivity. A question of what “death” signifies emerges here and runs throughout this book. In attempting to establish a science through his image of a unicellular organism, Freud creates a conceptually transportable metaphor. While the death drive sends Horkheimer and Adorno into despair because it is what secures our totalitarian subjection, Edelman regards the death drive as a cause for celebration because it is the only thing that saves us from totality. Despite the defensive measure the organism takes to ensure survival, it aims for death. In dystopian literature such as Kafka’s, the death drive is not simply about a singular desire to die, but also about how our ultimate aim for death potentially manifests in a horrific way of life. By implication, totalized ideological subjectivity, capable of genocide, is a necessary condition of human existence. An extension of Horkheimer and Adorno’s fixation is that our death drive is what dooms us to totalitarian subjectivity, resulting in the Holocaust and the culture industry, or more presently, biopolitics in cybernetic monopolies. In such a world, “love” or the life of the signifier are mere “detours” to the ultimate aim of, in Kafka’s words, “not death, alas, but the eternal torments of dying” (Diaries 302). What is history if not the latter?5

On an economic level, the unconscious compulsion to repeat traumatic neuroses involves a contradictory desire to sabotage the mastery of the ego, to break through its baked-through structure. Freud undermines his grandson’s cultural accomplishment of developing the capacity to tolerate the absence of the love object through symbolization in his “Fort-da” game. With the introduction of the death drive, “the theoretical importance of the [drives] of self-preservation, of self-assertion and of mastery greatly diminishes. They are component [drives] whose function it is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death” (BPP SE 47). The drive to die in one’s own fashion takes precedence as the final endpoint over the accomplishments of civilization.

Since Freud’s speculative text, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the death drive has assumed many forms, some contradictory, both in critical theory and in the broader cultural sphere. Confusion arises from Freud’s different conceptualizations of binding and unbinding. Generally, binding is associated with life-giving functions—all-inclusive synthesizing, a bringing together—while unbinding signifies a kind of destruction—taking apart, splitting, or separating. But these associations were not always the case, especially in Beyond. Jean Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis differentiate between the economic type of binding “long-recognized that correlates to the ego and secondary processes” and another, I would say, dynamic type, “closer to the laws governing unconscious desire and organization of phantasy—the laws … of the primary process—where the free energy itself … is not a massive discharge of excitation but rather an energy which flows along chains of ideas and implies associative ‘links’ ” (Laplanche and Pontalis 51–52). In the latter sense, binding describes the linking together of ideas, the synthesizing conditions of thought processes, repairing, mourning, and letting go: life-giving functions. Unbinding in the dynamic sense would mark a melancholic attachment to lost objects, as well as the breakdown of thought: a tendency toward destruction and the function of the death drive.6 Arguably, Freud’s economic employment of binding and unbinding in Beyond the Pleasure Principle contradicts the dynamic definition of binding on which he settles in his later work and which Melanie Klein takes up in her theorization of psychic positions.7 I argue that these two types of binding, as well as the confusion arising from their conflation, produces compelling effects for thinking through the drives.

The structure of the ego in Beyond adheres to the economic model of binding, for the most part. Because the drives emerge from unconscious, primary processes, “The impulses arising from the [drives] do not belong to the type of bound nervous processes but of freely mobile processes which press towards discharge” (BPP SE 40, emphases in original). Unbound, free-flowing energy produces unpleasure in the organism. Working within the structures of the protective cortical layer, binding manages energy and prevents an influx “analogous to a traumatic neurosis” (BPP SE 41). Under the forces of the pleasure principle in the service of survival, the psyche transforms free-flowing energy into bound energy by processing excitation through psychic facilitations, or neuronic pathways that direct the cathectic flow.

While the compulsion to repeat can lead to either binding as protection from the outside or unbinding as a desire to sabotage from the inside, the link between binding and the drives is ambiguous. The “daemonic” unbinding force emerging from within is what interests Freud and what ultimately leads him to speculate about the death drive. In his later works, Freud reinforces this initial association between unbinding and the death drive.8 The way Freud initially theorizes the death drive in economic terms leads him to a central contradiction, because he uses the pleasure principle as his departure point. Although he later departs from his speculative ambivalence in this text, certain moments beg for reconsideration in order to think about their effects. If the pleasure principle aims to keep the amount of excitation as low as possible, then the principle’s function “thus described would be concerned with the most universal endeavor of all living substance—namely to return to the quiescence of the inorganic world” (BPP SE 76). The phrasing of this last clause causes a proliferative ambiguity in Freud’s thinking. When describing different forms of energy, Freud uses the signifier “quiescent” (ruhender) synonymously with the signifier “bound” (gebunden). In this moment, Freud reaffirms that economic binding is in the service of the death drive.

In this case, the work of binding, if taken to its extreme completion uninterrupted by the shattering effects of life, necessarily leads to the complete “quiescence” of the inorganic world. The death drive is not linked to unbinding here, as Laplanche and Pontalis conclude, but rather the opposite, the epitome of the bound psychic state, an ever-spreading work of absolute silence and the gradual cessation of free-flowing cathexis. Death occurs in the event that the baked-through structures of the protective cortical layer extend throughout the organism to maximize inorganic calm. In this case, binding would constitute a complete structural reification. The work of binding in this moment is not antithetical to the death drive but is rather in its service. Binding’s operation to ensure life acquires a deceptive appearance.

A major difference between the drives is their relation to internal perception, and this difference contributes to the problematics of binding. Freud draws some telling conclusions about the drives that also potentiate confusion:

the life [drives] have so much more contact with our internal perception—emerging as breakers of the peace and constantly producing tensions whose release is felt as pleasure—while the death [drives] seem to do their work unobtrusively. The pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death [drives]. It is true that it keeps watch upon stimuli from without, which are regarded as dangers by both kinds of [drives]; but it is more especially on guard against increases of stimulation from within, which would make the task of living more difficult. (BPP SE 77, emphasis added).9

The death drive operates stealthily. Insofar as perception works on qualitative and quantitative differences in rhythms of stimuli, the subject cannot perceive its workings since the death drive remains consistent with the principle of constancy. That the death drive is quiet is also anti-intuitive, whether conceived of in its politically destructive manifestation in connection with the Third Reich or in its emancipatory romanticization in connection with avant-garde art.

The life drive, on the other hand, is out and proud, so to speak, disturbing the peace as the only drive that the subject can readily perceive. The endogenous unbinding threat that initially leads Freud to speculate about the death drive becomes, by his conclusion, attributed to those life forces opposing the death drive. Freud’s suggested description of the death drive as a “daemonic force” is also tenuous. The pleasure principle defends against the life drive, those “increases of stimulation from within” that push toward life but which, in doing so, make “living more difficult.” Earlier in the text, Freud indicates that the compulsion to repeat plainly exhibits the character of the drives and, “when they act in opposition to the pleasure principle, give the appearance of some ‘daemonic’ force at work” (BPP SE 41, emphasis added). If the pleasure principle is, as Freud concludes, in the service of the death drive, and if it guards initially against a “daemonic” force, then that “daemonic” force stems not from the death drive but from the life drive, that breaker of peace. In Beyond’s economic model, contrary to Freud’s initial observations about the endogenous unbound energy of traumatic neuroses, the life drive unbinds and the death drive binds, and contrary to Freud’s expectations, the “daemonic” drive refers to the former.

Perhaps the passage above indicates a change of mind, but more generally it suggests the difficulty of differentiating clearly between the drives in Freud’s thinking. Th...