Summer 2003
Volume 29, Number 4

See Also Teresa de Lauretis: The Stubborn Drive (Summer 1998) Arnold Davidson: How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis: A Reading of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Winter 1987) Arnold Davidson: Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality (Autumn 1987)

eXistenZ's science-fictional novum,¹ the interface of the human psyche with bioelectronic devices, is a sort of analogue to Freud's notion of the drive (Trieb). Trieb is conceived as an entity bridging the mental and the somatic, the interface of mind and body that produces a third conceptual category, the human psyche, and thus the human's psychic reality. Interfacing the human psyche with bioelectronic-somatic devices, eXistenZ exposes a bridging of the human and the technological that produces human reality as virtual. My aim in reading Cronenberg's film with Freud's theory of drives is twofold: beside the light that each sheds on the other and the renewed relevance that the film confers, in these times, to Freud's unpopular view of human imperfectibility, I want to recover Freud's persistent doubt about the nature of human reality as a way to think about the world in which we live.

Since the late nineteenth century, philosophers and economists have associated modernity, capitalist production and technological development with a process of creative destruction. With its bifurcated movement as Eros and death drive, Freud's Trieb can take its place in that genealogical line: Eros, the life drive to preserve living substance and join together individuals to create higher organisms, families, and nations, is itself inseparably joined to a contrary psychic force, Todestrieb, the drive to disjoin and dissolve all aggregates psychic, social, or organic. Thus human life itself, for Freud, is governed by a process of creation and destruction. It is no news that his view was inflected by the mentality or episteme of his time. Indeed, on this very basis, recent commentators on and practitioners of psychoanalysis have rejected drive theory as mired in a Darwinian or Lamarckian biologism that renders it antiquated and inadequate to our times.

It must be noted, however, with John Fletcher, that "the two theorists who elaborate a vehement and systematic critique of the false biologism of classical psychoanalytic theory, Jean Laplanche and Jacques Lacan, both retain a concept of the drive; indeed, both elaborate new theories of the drive, not as the expression of the body and its needs but as the byproduct of the signifying relations between the subject and the other (however differently conceived these new theories may be)."² I suggest further that, if we look at Freud's notion of the drive in a Foucauldian genealogical perspective and choose as its starting point Cronenberg's allegory of creative destruction in postmodernity, we find confirmation that the drive is not a biological entity but rather a psychic one, an effect of "signifying relations between the subject and the other." The nature of that "other" is what I want to rethink in relation to the film.