A different death drive

Teresa de Lauretis is another prominent thinker who relates the concept of “queer” to the death drive. It is important here to juxtapose these two authors, who at first sight seem to offer similar approaches to “queer”. Since at least the 1980s, De Lauretis has been an influential feminist thinker who works within the field of cultural studies. She applies psychoanalysis and semiotics to analysis of lesbian experience and representation. De Lauretis’ most recent work: Freud’s Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film (2008) explores several films from the Freudian perspective. Like Edelman, de Lauretis also focuses on negativity as a ground for the analysis of non-normative sexualities.

Contrary to Edelman, de Lauretis does not explicitly theorize “queer”. The chapter “The Queer Space of the Drive: Rereading Freud with Laplanche” relates psychoanalysis in a more direct manner to the concept of “queer”, but the focus of the whole book is not on “queer” but rather on “negativity” and, therefore, at this point it might be fruitful to juxtapose Freud’s Drive with No Future.

“Queer” is approached by de Lauretis through the methods of psychoanalysis and poststructural literary criticism. De Lauretis takes her terms and a general analytical approach from these methodologies, but there are also strong psychoanalytical influences on the level of the content of book. De Lauretis does not directly discuss current politics or the politics of gay and lesbian communities. Instead, she writes about several works of fiction and she analyses them in relation to the death motif in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. The concepts, such as trope, metaphor, signifier and figure, which she uses in Freud’s Drive are from literary criticism and this is similar to Edelman in No Future.

De Lauretis approaches negativity via figures of death. The Freudian death drive cannot be approached directly because it is purely negative, hence the author writes about it only via figures. Following Freud and Laplanche, de Lauretis claims that the death drive has a crucial connection to sexuality (de Lauretis 2008, 8). She analyses the death drive through works of fiction using psychoanalytic discourse. Works of fiction are seen through psychoanalytical lenses but psychoanalysis is also seen as a particular narration, a fiction. In a Lacanian manner, she treats texts as a psyche and psyche as a text.

De Lauretis does not aim at creating a strong theory. She says that a theory is also “a figure of the history of the present” (de Lauretis 2008, 2), it is a struggle to articulate the present. Such a theory is an engagement in reading and rewriting the present and to de Lauretis this means that her work can be considered “also political”. De Lauretis sees her work on negativity as political for the reason that it is a form of commitment to the present and, moreover, to theorize is always a political stance.

De Lauretis explains her interest in the death drive as follows: “If I return to Freud’s notion of an unconscious death drive, it is because it conveys the sense of and the force of something in human reality that resists discursive articulation as well as political diplomacy, an otherness that haunts the dream of a common world” (de Lauretis 2008, 9). This explanation also clearly sets out the field of her inquiry, namely its language, its possibilities and its limitations. It would seem that de Lauretis, like Edelman, situates herself as an anti-communitarian, but this I think would be a simplification. When she criticizes what she calls

“the dream of a common world” she is against the discourse of individuality and, particularly in her passionate reading of Cronenberg movies, she highlights the fact that problems of identification always have to be seen in relation to race and class. Politically de Lauretis’

position can be considered as anti-communitarian but this does not characterises fully the way she uses “queer”, particularly that she does not offer a unitary version of “queer”; the term is rather used to signify an abstract, excluded position. Paradoxically, in comparison with de Lauretis, Edelman with his call to embrace queer negativity seems to affirm romantic individualism. Lauretis avoids this trap by analysing how the individual is formed by various narrations and, at the same time, she intentionally leaves the “queer” position undefined.

“Queer” seems to be a position that can be inhabited by some form of agency, but it would be perhaps a destabilized or alternative form of agency. De Lauretis leaves this question open and, unlike Edelman, does not make an ethical call to embrace the queer position.

De Lauretis investigates heterogeneity, alterity and the possibility for its expressions (see especially her collection of essays Figures of Resistance, 2007). For de Lauretis the reinterpretation of fantasies that underlie the social realm is a political task. She believes that, following Paul de Man, by approaching fictions and theories on the figural level, language can be opened up from universalizing structures into “possibilities of referential aberrations” (the term comes from Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading, 1979) (de Lauretis 2007, 255). These linguistic, referential aberrations might offer an interesting insight into marginalized and non-normative sexualities.

As mentioned earlier, De Lauretis connects the concept of “queer” with the Freudian concept of the death drive; in fact, at points the reader might be confused whether de Lauretis is talking about “queer” or the “death drive” as these terms seem, at points, to be interchangeable and work as an internal form of critique towards language. She writes:

As I let the figure guide me and displace me through the reading of Freud and of Laplanche’s reading of Freud, it takes me to a queer, non-binary place – dis-place – in which the categorical opposition between the psychic and the biological, between the order of the signifier and the materiality of the body, or between the organic and the

inorganic no longer hold. This is the figural space inhabited by Freud’s drive, a non-homogenous, heterotropic space of passage, of transit and transformation ‘between the mental and the somatic’, where between does not stand for the binary logic of exclusion but figures the movement of a passing. (de Lauretis 2008, 13)

Her way of theorizing “queer” is different from that presented by Edelman. In Freud’s Drive there are no imperatives calling readers to embrace a queer position. Moreover, “queer” here is more consistently a negative term as it is only a position of transition and of passage. It is not a structural negation of norms but a sign of a possible destabilization of subjectivity or meaning.

It is not clear what the “place” that de Lauretis describes refers to, but to me, the use of “queer”

in the passage above more closely resembles Sedgwick’s theorization of “queer” (Sedgwick 1993) than Edelman’s No Future.

De Lauretis rarely uses the concept of “queer”, but I would say that it is an important term for her and it has a peculiar function. It is not a concept that opposes another term or category, but rather a concept standing in-between other terms or concepts, in a place of difference. Moreover, as a figure, “queer” is not typical one, but is instead a figure for figuration itself, as it does not mark anything concrete but just the passing or transformation, or even the very possibility of transformation which exists within sexuality. This understanding of

“queer” is close to de Man’s concept of irony (de Man 1989 and 1996).

Edelman also declares that his concept of “queer” owes much to de Manian irony.

Nevertheless, it seems that both of them were influenced by de Man in very different ways. In Edelman’s work, “queer” stands for the outside of the system of tropes, and hence the outside of meaning, while de Lauretis does not assume any outside or any absolute negation. I would say that de Lauretis is a more consistent reader, perhaps a more radical one, of Paul de Man.

For her there is no possibility of any conclusion or of any ethics in the name of “queer”.

Negative ethics seems to be internally contradicted and perhaps that is the reason why de Lauretis does not make any call to embrace negativity, nor does she use any “we” as a subject of her writing or the imagined community to which she directs her text. De Lauretis states that similarities between Edelman’s project and hers are coincidental and even with all these similarities she finds these projects unrelated. She explains her point as follows:

Edelman urges queers to embrace a figural identification with the death drive as jouissance, a figure for the undoing identity and the heteronormative order of meaning.

My reading of Freud’s drive offers no programme, no ethical position, no polemic, only queer figures of passing in the uninhabited space between mind and matter. (de Lauretis 2008, 87).

The processes how we construct our sexualities, how these constructions are limited but also enabled by different normative instances are continuous and, even in the case of marginalized groups, are never purely negative. I believe that if “queer” is to remain a meaningful concept with political potential, it should not be used without connection to the reality of how sexuality is experienced, described and fantasized. Therefore, I find inspiring de Lauretis’ proposition to think about figures of transformation. It is an encouragement to always think differently about sexuality. Perhaps these figures of transformation are not explicitly political or perhaps they are anti-political as they can be deconstructive towards the concepts that we use to think about our presence in the world, about ourselves. Thinking through the figures of transformation is a way of resisting any stable meaning of sexuality. De Lauretis analyses sexuality as a field of fantasies, therefore sexuality is a product of semiotic systems, “sexuality is an effect of signs”

(de Lauretis 2008, 29). The figure of death displaces this system and allows its reinterpretation, or alternatively it does not allow for these signs to create a coherent system.

De Lauretis conceptualization of negativity is theoretically very compelling, and from the very beginning of Freud’s Drive she declares that it is also a political project (de Lauretis 2008, 3). Perhaps every hermeneutic project is political, particularly when it concerns sexuality, class and race, but perhaps hermeneutics is not enough. I agree with José Esteban Muñoz who argues: “Queerness, like feminism, is an essentially performative endeavor, a mode of doing as opposed to being. This is not to say that being and performativity are easily unyoked, but I do want to suggest that shifting from a hermeneutic that is primarily attuned to the epistemological is a good thing” (Muñoz 2007, 550).