22 See also in this regard Laplanche and Pontalis’ work on the temporality of fantasy and
Before turning to Derrida’s treatment of an autoimmune death drive I will consider a further Freudian psychoanalytic treatment of this strange and seemingly ‘unnatural’ logic of self-destruction. This Freudian treatment will attempt to return unpleasurable, painful, traumatic repetitions back to what he figures as an organism’s “proper path”: the pleasure principle, a principle that will be seen to refer not only to life but also to death. In Freud’s structural account of the psyche – which comes to complicate and supplement my somatic account of illness – the id the ego and the super-ego are seen to mediate any relation to the body and to life (Freud 1935).23 For Freud, the id (das Es) marks the non-phenomenal unconscious as the dark imperceptible location of the instincts, a strange ‘archive’ of repressed memories, and the primary site of the instinct for pleasure that seeks instant gratification in the release of these disturbing repressed excitations. The ego (das Ich) represents the conscious and preconscious aspect of the psyche that wishes only for pleasure.24 Yet, the Ich must negotiate between the desire of the Es for instant gratification and the worldly reality in which this gratification might prove socially disruptive and thus unpleasurable. The Ich defends the psyche by ‘sublimating’ or transforming the instinct for pleasure into socially acceptable forms. The super-ego (das Über-Ich) further limits the pleasurable wishes of the Ich and the instincts of the Es, as it represents the psyche’s conscience that seeks to align the subject to external moral norms; it is the Über-Ich that prevents the Ich from killing itself in the pursuit of pleasure. It is, therefore, the stability of the Ich that counts in Freud’s account of the pleasure principle, for it is the Ich that negotiates between the world, the Über-Ich and the Es, and allows the psyche to achieve some form of sublimated pleasure. An Ich destabilized by the Es via the all too forceful return of the repressed, or limited too excessively by a guilty conscience or a worldly reality, produces neuroses, hysteria, psychoses and illness.
23The pain that my body experiences physically in the mechanisms of my autoimmune disease
are not, I am suggesting caused wholly by a psychic disturbance, but rather that a psychic disturbance may supplement the discomfort of the body, in myriad undecidable ways.
24James Strachey’s now accepted translation of Freud (in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud) translates the German Es (it), Ich (I), and Über-Ich
(over- or above-I) as id, ego and super-ego. This translation, however, obscures the meaning of these terms in the German, I will therefore use continue to use the German when referring to these for reasons that will become clear.
I suggested above that John’s traumatic repetition compulsion represents an excessive disturbance from the repressed memory of his trauma. This compulsion, in attempting to defend him retrospectively, disturbed his Ich’s ability to sublimate, in a socially permissible manner, the instinct for pleasurable release of this excitation. This has made John sick through further disturbing his psyche. I also suggested that John might respond to this sickness by desiring a suicidal end to his suffering via a self-destructive act. However, according to Freud, “we cannot conceive how the ego [das Ich] can consent to its own destruction” for, in Freud’s account, the Ich can only wish for pleasure and not self-destruction (2001 [1917], 252). What John wants to kill, or destroy, in Freud’s terms, is not his Ich as such but a certain subjective-self – or “Ich- subject” (Smith 2010). John’s subjectivity has been produced by the repetitive disturbances of social, political and biological realities that ‘narrate’ and unite the Es, Ich, and Über-Ich in a certain way. For John, this narration has produced a sick subject, and it is this that is treated as the object of his destructive wish, a destruction that is turned outwards by the Ich, in order that it may return to its own pleasurable path (252). John’s seemingly suicidal desire appears, therefore in Freud’s thinking, to be a desire for murder and not suicide. He wishes to kill the particular subject, self or autos (the sui- of suicide), which is manifested as other to its own pleasurable wish to release his trauma. Freud’s Ich (ego) does not mean ‘I myself’ as the Latin ego is often translated into English (OED 1989), but an ‘I’ that exists without any stable ‘self.’ The ego, for Freud, is simply an apparatus that wishes for pleasure, it knows only this. In this psychoanalytic logic, the defence of ‘the self’ is shifted to a defence of the pleasure principle ‘itself.’
Therefore, in Freud’s analysis, pleasure – a pleasure that will cure psychic illnesses – is to be achieved not by returning the patients to themselves as such, but by relieving psychic tension via any available route. For Freud, that the psyche will take pleasure wherever it can be found results in it being open to suggestion that helps to guide the immanent repressed wishes of the Es towards their pleasurable release. Yet, Robert Rowland Smith has argued that it is not
only suggestion, as Freud suggests, to which the ‘Ich-subject’ is open. For Smith, it is also affected by persuasion, rhetoric and ideology in the “marketplace activity” that “barters” for sublimation as it competes with others for pleasure socially, politically and psychically (Smith 2010, 159).25 In this reading, many multiple subjective-selves or ‘Ich-subjects’ can form as the psyche is influenced (and disturbed) by various ideological narratives. For John, (and, perhaps, for myself) it is the ‘ideological’ narrative of a stable self that has, in the past, produced and sustained a homeostasis in the experience of pleasure (the comforting narrative of a future suffused with pleasurable expectations of autonomy, fatherhood, and legacy – reason, cures and certainty). The disruption of this pleasurable ideology, which reveals an unstable self, produces psychic disturbance and unpleasure, and, for John, trauma, and illness. Therefore, in order that John may return to a pleasurable path it seems necessary for him to find this pleasure somewhere other than in the fabled security of the self – he requires a new Ich-subject to form and to negotiate with the world on behalf of his pleasurable instincts. However, John has become so attached to his libidinal desire for the role of the father – and the sovereign ipseity it confers – that he refuses to relinquish this concept of the self and instead repeats the unpleasure of its traumatic disturbance. Freud describes such a case of attachment in his analysis of the case of Wolf Man:
Any position of the libido which he [Wolf Man] had once taken up was obstinately defended by him from fear of what he would lose by giving it up and from distrust of the probability of a complete substitute being afforded by the new position that was in view. This is an important and fundamental psychological peculiarity, which I described […] as a susceptibility to ‘fixation.’ (Freud 2001 [1918], 115)
25 Suggestion, for Freud, is merely a mechanism that matches up with a repressed wish, and
allows for its release, it therefore only ever allows for the release of a wish that was already
present in the psyche. For Smith however, the psyche is also open to persuasion as a force that
may alter the psychic balance as well as, hopefully, permitting the release of pleasure. I will return to this point in my reading of the Freudian death drive that follows.
John’s fixation on his libidinal desire ‘autoimmunely’ condemns him to, and closes him within, an overactive defence of a certain ideology of selfhood that is unable to relieve his trauma. Yet, for Freud, this ‘autoimmunity’ is not inherent to the Ich ‘itself,’ the autos that is destroyed by the psyche’s ‘immune system,’ is to be seen as other to the Ich’s pleasure-seeking self. In Freud’s logic, the self that effects the psyche negatively is not the psyche itself, but the product of an ideological, rhetorical effect produced through an external narrative of the ‘marketplace’ that negotiates for a return to pleasure. It would be the task of psychoanalysis to help John’s Ich find a substitute route through this external ‘marketplace’ to relieve his fixation on this certain self, and to satisfy his libidinal drive to achieve the pleasure of a restful quietude.
This psychoanalytic treatment treats autoimmunity by turning its destructive tendency outwards and away from the singular function of the psyche. Is there, therefore, no autoimmunity to be found here in the psyche? Is the psyche, as Freud seems to suggest, incapable of destroying itself so that an autoimmune self-induced death would be impossible for the psyche itself? In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1955), Freud “speculates” that, yes the psyche is incapable of destroying itself, but also, yes, it is capable of inducing its own death.26 How are we to understand this strange claim? If the primary process of the psyche is the search for pleasure, and if pleasure is figured as a lack of unpleasure – so that it is affected by no external (or internal) disturbances as a peaceful state of restful quietude – then pleasure begins to look a lot like death. Death is not absent in Freud’s psychic mechanism; instead it becomes its very goal. The uncertainty of an autoimmune self is replaced in Freud’s psychic apparatus by the certainty of the psyche’s own proper instinct – or drive – for pleasure. The repetitions of pleasurable release, give the vicissitudes of life as they detour around various worldly limitations, but “beyond the pleasure principle,” they are ultimately driving towards a pleasurable quiet, undisturbed non-destructive death. The ‘autoimmunity’ that the psyche itself enacts is, therefore, not terrifying or
26
The fact that Freud tempers his theory of the death drive by naming it as a “speculation” will prove significant in the analysis that follows here (1955, 24). The character of this thesis as a speculation is also taken up by Derrida in his essay ‘To Speculate – on “Freud”’ (1987b), I will turn to Derrida’s deconstruction of Freud’s death drive in the final section of this chapter.
traumatic, but known, comforting and pleasurable. Freud describes this death drive in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ in the following way:
Every modification which is […] imposed upon the course of the organism’s life is accepted by the conservative organic instincts and stored up for further repetition. These instincts are therefore bound to give a deceptive appearance of being forces tending towards change and progress, whilst in fact they are merely seeking to reach an ancient goal by paths alike old and new. Moreover it is possible to specify this final goal of all organic striving. It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts if the goal of life were a state of things which had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons – becomes inorganic again – then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of life is death’ and looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones.’ (Freud 1955, 38 emph. Freud’s)
Yet if, as Freud argues here, death is a necessity that “knows no exception” then why does he find in the psyche the need for a drive towards this death? This drive is required, according to Freud, because the psyche must “ward off” external unknown disturbances that would further defer its return to pleasure/death. The necessity of deathly pleasure is, therefore, seen by the psyche not as a necessity, but as a desired goal that is threatened by the external modifications of life. These modifications, as disturbances, are stored in the psychic archive in order to be repeated later through a pleasurable release when negotiations with external conditions permit. Therefore, self-preservative, self- asserting acts, for Freud, are not the ‘masters’ of the psyche, they are but “component instincts whose function it is to assure that the organism shall follow
its own path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those that are immanent in the organism itself,” for the psychic organism wishes to die “only in its own fashion” (1955, 39 emph. mine). The psyche, therefore attempts to ward off new disturbances so that its old disturbances, which are immanent to it, can be released on its own path back towards death.
However, the logic of Freud’s psychic apparatus, seems to suggest that the organism must remain resolutely closed to all external forces: there can be no external force as such, for a disturbance that was truly foreign would not be recognised by it – the psyche knows only its own immanent drive for pleasure. Therefore, external modifications as soon as they appear would surely be incorporated into the psychic apparatus and repeated only in terms of their pleasurable release. Even when experienced as unpleasure – as in the case of trauma – repetitions are but a means of relieving internal tensions via a belated ‘inoculation’ that is but another manifestation of the pleasure principle. In the psyche all external forces would, therefore, be either wholly unknown to it or incorporated into its one sovereign drive: the pleasure principle as principal, and the death drive as its obscure master. Here we therefore encounter an ‘autoimmunitary’ act where a self-referential defensive act is necessarily, in all cases, the guardian of a pleasurable past to which it must inevitably return. Does this treatment of autoimmunity comfort the instability of the ‘self’ and the threatening character of death? Can autoimmune illness be reconfigured, not as fearful acceleration towards a future death but as a welcome return to it?
For Freud, the deferral of death as pleasure is produced via the modifications of life that are repeated and relieved as pleasure, a pleasure that is nothing other than the repetition of this earlier deathly pleasure of the inanimate. In Robert Rowland Smith’s words: “Put at its most tautologous: life, that is pleasure, seeks death, that is pleasure, that is life” (2010, 69). This Freudian flattening of terms within the One Master drive of psychic life removes all difference in the repetitions that defer death. For Freud, the “deceptive appearance” of change is in fact the same deferral of death, rather than a deferral of the same death. The
deception renders all difference within the psyche fictive, as Freud states: “there are no ‘indications of reality’ in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect” (Freud 1985 [1887], 264). Yet, if this is the case, then how is Freud able to suggest that the pleasure principle reveals the certain truth of an unconscious death drive that is “its own”? If the memory of a traumatic event exists not in external reality but as an immanent belated narration of this memory as traumatic, then wouldn’t the psyche exist always in a state of belief rather than certainty? And wouldn’t Freud’s own pleasure principle (that tells of the death drive) become but another uncertain fiction?
As Smith claims, in the fictive unconscious, the Ich-subject would be unable to gauge its own truth and would thus be capable of appropriating all fictions as ‘its own’ (160). This self-appropriation of the external disturbance might correspond to its desire to release ‘its own’ immanent excitations in order to return it to ‘its own’ death, but it could equally institute a completely new fiction that would encourage the Ich-subject to, for example, go to war, or to take a drug that is also as a poison. Would this new fiction be incorporated into the psyche’s own circuitous path back to death, or lead it towards a new radically destructive and autoimmune end? What would be the difference? The difference appears to be named by Freud as the difference between a comforting, proper and pleasurable death and a painful, improper destructive one. Yet, if all difference is but a deception, a fiction, or a narrative of the same, then as soon as an external disruption is ‘known’ to the psyche (as soon as it is effected by it and has thus incorporated it), there is no real difference to be found between the threat of destruction, and the immanent promise of relief from an external (now internal) threat. Destruction and pleasure would be rendered indifferent. There is, therefore, nothing to be risked in these repetitions of life, for life would be sure to return to a deathly inanimate state that could well destroy it, but this now immanent threat is narrated as its own comforting pleasurable end.
Except, of course, there is everything to be risked. For, the flattening of terms here has not resolved the fear of an autoimmune drive to death; it has merely
named the possibly ‘diseased’ and painful path that it follows as ultimately referring only to pleasure even amidst the worst pain. The psychoanalytic cure cures not the symptoms of illness – for symptoms could always return in every ‘deceptive’ repetition of a cure as an unpleasurable pleasure – it seems to merely relieve the trauma of its uncertainty by narrating its end to be a certain deathly pleasure that is never put at risk. And yet, even this goal appears not to be so secure. For, if life, that is pleasure, seeks death, that is pleasure, that is life, then does not the remainder of pleasure in death ‘risk’ returning to life? Might the minimal inanimate state of death, once ‘returned’ to, be modified by an unexpected, unforeseen external force to be once again deferred differently? Might Freud’s defensive deferral in fact mark, as Derrida claims in his reading of Freud, a différantial defence, as a deferral and a differing of life-death ‘itself’ (Derrida 1972, 80-81)? Might Freud’s immune death itself be destructively autoimmune? And, indeed, might there still remain the threat of a remainderless death, one that would destroy all, but that cannot be repeated and relieved in a return to pleasure for it remains to come?
5.
The Dead Zone III
No Apocalypse
John was born in ideology. His Ich-subject has been persuaded, through the rhetorical devices of myriad narratives, to construct the ideology of a stable self. In bioscience (and the narratives of SNS and the organism), in language (autos as ipseity), in politics (the family, the nation the body-politic) and in literature and films (etc.), depictions and expectations of stability have assumed that a self- closed to the other will secure life, survival and pleasure. Incorporating this ideological modification of life into his own psyche, John repeats this now