The stubborn drive

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 24, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 851-877

  Lauretis, Teresa De ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33746573456     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/448899     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. For evidence of the resistance to Freud among North American intellectuals, one only need see Frederick Crews's reviews of recent and less recent works about, or rather, against the Father of psychoanalysis: for example, "The Unknown Freud," New York Review of Books, 18 Nov. 1993, pp. 55-66
2. and "Keeping Us in Hysterics," The New Republic, 12 May 1997, pp. 35-43. The ambivalence displayed by the rhetorical excess of Crews's attacks on Freud, repeated on just about any likely occasion, is but a blown-up and better-informed version of the ambivalence that has characterized American academic studies since the late 1960s and American intellectual life as a whole since Freud's first and only visit to the United States in 1909
3. See Teresa de Lauretis, "American Freud," American Studies/Amerika-studien 41, no. 2 (1996): 163-79
4. Sexualtrieb is usually rendered in English with "sexual instinct" because the Standard Edition of Freud's works translates both Instinkt and Trieb as "instinct." This, I believe, is partly responsible for the anglophone misunderstanding of Freud's concept of drive. How-ever, since I will be quoting from Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho-logical Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), hereafter abbreviated SE, I use the words instinct and drive synonymously throughout the paper
5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexual-ity, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1980), p. 114; hereafter abbreviated HS
6. See Foucault, The Care of the Self, vol. 3 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Hurley (New York, 1986). Freud refers to the Oneirocritica in his Traumdeutung;see Freud, The Interpre-tation of Dreams, in SE, 4:98-99
7. See also de Lauretis, "Sexual Structuring and Habit Changes," The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), p. 311
8. Foucault, "The Confession of the Flesh" (1977), interview with Alain Grosrichard et al., Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, trans. Colin Gordon et al., ed. Gordon (New York, 1980), pp. 212-13, 218
9. See Foucault, Dits et écrits, 1954-1988, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, 4 vols. (Paris, 1994), 3:298-329
10. Foucault, "The History of Sexuality," interview with Lucette Finas, Power/Knowledge, pp. 187, 186
11. "Les Rapports de pouvoir passent à l'intérieur des corps," Dits et écrits, p. 231
12. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Hurley (New York, 1985), p. 5; hereafter abbreviated UP
13. Foucault, "Two Lectures," Power/Knowledge, p. 83
14. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York, 1993), p. 15
15. On intersubjectivity in Freud's conception of homosexuality as bisexuality, for ex-ample, see Whitney Davis, Drawing the Dream of the Wolves: Homosexuality, Interpretation, and Freud's "Wolf Man" (Bloomington, Ind., 1995)
16. See de Lauretis, "Sexual Structuring and Habit Changes," The Practice of Love, pp. 298-312
17. quot;Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)," in "Lenin and Philosophy" and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster [New York, 1971], p. 162)
18. Stuart Hall, "Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity," in Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London, 1996), p. 413
19. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore, 1976), pp. 23, 24. As Hayden White puts it, "drive is a product of the psyche's capacity to re-present organic forces, which is to say, at once present them and transform them" (Hayden White, "Bodies and Their Plots," in Choreographing History, ed. Susan Leigh Foster [Bloomington, Ind., 1995], p. 230)
20. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York, 1973), p. 317
21. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, trans. William Boelhower, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), p. 378
22. Freud, "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming," SE, 9:150
23. See Lacan, "Motifs du crime paranoïaque: Le Crime des soeurs Papin," Minotaure, no. 3-4 (Feb. 1933): 25-28
24. discussed by Lynda Hart, Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression (Princeton, N.J., 1994), pp. 145-50
25. See also Victor Burgin, "Paranoiac Space," In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 126-30, and Christopher Lane, "'The Delirium of Interpretation': Writing the Papin Affair," Differ-ences 5, no. 2 (1993): 24-61
26. See Hart, Fatal Women, pp. 128-30
27. Compare Freud, "The Economic Problem of Masochism" (1924), SE, 19:159-70 and "Medusa's Head" (1922), SE, 18:273-74
28. see Homi K. Bhabha's collection of essays, The Location of Culture (London, 1994). The film shows the profound interconnection of sexuality and desire with gender and with race
29. Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," SE, 14:252
30. If one is prepared to overlook a little inexactitude, it may be said that the death instinct which is operative in the organism-primal sadism-is identical with mas-ochism. After the main portion of it has been transposed outwards on to objects, there remains inside, as a residuum of it, the erotogenic masochism proper, which on the one hand has become a component of the libido and, on the other, still has the self as its object.... In certain circumstances the sadism, or instinct of destruction, which has been directed outwards, projected, can be once more introjected, turned inwards, and in this way regress to its earlier situation. If this happens, a secondary masochism is produced, which is added to the original masochism. [Freud, "The Economic Problem of Masochism," SE, 19:164]
31. quot;Mise-en-abyme refers to the infinite regress of mirror reflections to denote the literary, painterly or filmic process by which a passage, a section or sequence plays out in miniature the processes of the text as a whole" (Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film Seyniotics [London, 1992], p. 201). It is not coincidental, I think, that this technique of visual and narrative construction, which in French is called mise-en-abîme, in English is called mirror construction
32. See Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton et al. (Bloomington, Ind., 1982)