Wound envy: Touching Cronenberg's Crash

Screen

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 193-202

  Smith, Marq ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 28444457989     PISSN: 00369543     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchmann (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), p. 67
2. See Barbara Creed, 'Anal wounds, metallic kisses'
3. Michael Grant, 'Crimes of the future'
4. and Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, 'Automatic lover', Screen, vol. 39, no. 2 (1998), pp. 175-92
5. Georges Bataille speaks of a copula as a vehicle of love in 'The solar anus', in Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 5-9, 6. The US trailer for Crash speaks of 'love in the dying moments of the twentieth century'
6. Georges Bataille, 'Hegel, death and sacrifice', trans. Jonathan Strauss, in Allan Stoekl (ed.), Yale French Studies, no. 78 (1990), special issue 'On Bataille', p. 16
7. See Octavio Paz, 'Order and accident', in Conjunctions and Disjunctions, trans. Helen Lane (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990), pp. 103-13, 112
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, 'Of voluntary death', in Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1969), pp. 97-9
9. J.G. Ballard, Crash (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 13
10. Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, trans. James and Alix Strachey, The Pelican Freud Library Volume 3 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 393
11. See work by John Eric Erichsen, Hermann Oppenheim, Jean-Martin Charcot, and Georges Albert Édouard Brutus Gilles de la Tourette. For an instructive discussion on these matters, see Ursula Link-Heer, '"Male hysteria": a discourse analysis', Cultural Critique (Spring 1990), pp. 207-11
12. See Martin Stone, 'Shell shock and the psychologists', in W.F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Sheperd (eds), The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry. Volume II: Institutions and Society (London and New York: Tavistock Publications, 1985), pp. 242-71
13. Freud discusses how a 'rhythmic mechanical agitation of the body' produces sexual excitation. He mentions this in relation to the movement of carriages and railway travel and how, in later life [due to the repression of adolescent pleasures], this [sexual excitation] leads to travel anxiety, or traumatic neurosis. Freud, Three Essays, pp. 120-21
14. For the early Freud, anxiety, as displaced libido which has failed to discharge through sexual activity, later becomes the very protection against such disturbances of the psyche. See Samuel Weber, 'Appendix A: Beyond anxiety: the witch's letter', in Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan's Dislocation of Psychoanalysis, trans. Michael Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 152-67, 154, for further elaborations on this theme
15. Sigmund Freud, 'Screen memories', S.E. Vol. III (1893-1899), pp. 303-22, 310
16. See Juliet Mitchell, 'From King Lear to Anna O and beyond: some speculative theses on hysteria and the traditionless self', The Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 5, no. 2 (1992), pp. 91-107, 94
17. Sigmund Freud, 'Introduction to psycho-analysis and the war neuroses', in S.E. Vol. XVII (1917-1919), pp. 207-10
18. Freud suggests that in traumatic and war neuroses the ego defends itself from either internal (the libido) or external (violence) threats of damage. A more fully developed and reworked version of this assertion is later echoed by Freud in 'The ego and the id' (1923), in On Metapsychology (London: Penguin, 1984), pp. 350-407, where he ties the ego, as the seat of anxiety, to a fear of death, a development of the fear of castration, but only once the ego has relinquished its narcissistic libidinal cathexis, given up itself, 'because it feels itself hated and persecuted by the super-ego, instead of loved' (p. 400)
19. Barbara Creed, 'Phallic panic: male hysteria and Dead Ringers', Screen, vol. 31. no. 2 (1990), pp. 125-46
20. cited in Creed, 'Phallic panic', p. 139. Lacan's theory of sexual identification is already a theory of inadequacy, of castration
21. Here I am trying to follow closely the still incredibly suggestive approach of Jane Gallop in her Reading Lacan (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1965), p. 20. That Gallop and I begin from differently gendered starting points will of course significantly impact upon both the desire behind, and the effect of, our efforts
22. Elizabeth Grosz, 'ANIMAL SEX: libido as desire and death', in Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn (eds), Sexy Bodies: the Strange Carnalities Of Feminism (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 278-99
23. For another fascinating reading of Freud's 'Beyond the pleasure principle', see Suhail Malik, 'Castrating. Inventing. Death', in Joanne Morra, Mark Robson and Marq Smith (eds), The Limits of Death (MUP, forthcoming 1999)
24. Grosz, 'ANIMAL SEX, p. 289
25. Lynne Kirby, 'Male hysteria and early cinema', Camera Obscura, no. 17 (1988), pp. 112-31
26. Grant, 'Crimes of the future', p. 183
27. Creed, 'Anal wounds', p. 176
28. Paraphrasing is too generous a word to describe what I am doing to Jean-Luc Nancy's sharp observations. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al. (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press), pp. 380-1
29. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 188