by Nisarg Patel
Review: Rosaura Martínez Ruiz, Eros: Beyond the Death Drive, foreword by Judith Butler, translated by Ramsey McGlazer (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021), 208 pp.
Concepts live a strange and uncanny life; some come in silence and yet restructure the very foundation of thinking, some ‘strut and fret’ their ‘hour upon the stage’ and then are ‘heard no more’, some disappear only to appear at a much later date in new and unknown forms, and some simply never die. Freud’s ‘death drive’ [Todestrieb], which appeared in Freud’s oeuvre for the first time in 1920, must be classified into this last category, among those concepts that have lived, and continue to live, an undead life since their very inception. The concept of the ‘death drive’ has continued to exert a powerful hold when it comes to thinking/interpreting the ‘social’ through a psychoanalytic lens. It is present in the works of such classic thinkers as Melanie Klein, Herbert Marcuse, Jean Laplanche, Esther Sánchez-Pardo, as well as of contemporary authors, including Elizabeth Rottenberg, Alenka Zupančič, Adrian Johnstone, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Robert Rowland Smith, Todd McGowan, Rossella Valdre, Byung Chul-Han, and Julie Reshe. Rosaura Martínez Ruiz’s Eros: Beyond the Death Drive comes as the latest addition to this long and insightful tradition of thinking the ‘death drive’ as it operates and shapes the social as well as the political.
Eros begins with a simple yet incisive claim that the promise of the ‘beyond’ within Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle fundamentally remains ‘unfulfilled’ and that ‘there is nothing, for Freud, beyond the pleasure principle, which is sovereign’ (2-3). For Martínez, the pressing problem with the absence of the ‘beyond’ of the pleasure principle within Freud is not only that it positions the pleasure principle as an ‘insuperable’ boundary within which psychoanalysis eventually and inescapably gets trapped, but, more crucially, that, as a result of this (self-)trapping, Martínez argues following Derrida, it leaves psychoanalysis with a symptomatic ‘dearth or even outright lack of psychoanalytic participation in the political realm’ (2). The limits of the pleasure principle, in other words, are the very limits that incapacitate psychoanalysis from thinking politics. Martínez, in Eros, proposes to re-live/cure/work through the ‘sovereignty of the pleasure principle’ (3) so that the political ‘limits’ of the Freudian project can finally be transformed into ‘a site of possibility’ (4).
Martínez proposes to undertake this transformation of and in psychoanalysis through ‘a strategic intervention’ of deconstruction (5). It is not difficult to see the reason behind Martínez’s proposal for planting a deconstructive seed within the foliage of psychoanalysis. Deconstruction, as Martínez is aware, has traced and traversed the path(s) that psychoanalysis once did. Deconstruction engaged with the major themes of psychoanalysis, including i) subjectivity (‘Subject of deconstruction is subject of Freudian psychoanalysis, a subject, like being, is split and broken apart’ [17]), ii) temporality (‘temporality of the unconscious is an economy of overwriting’ [10]), iii) and history (‘history is in fact always to come, or has yet to be inscribed, and ontological experience is immersed in the logic of the a posteriori, constantly displaced and deferred’ [14]). Moreover, unlike psychoanalysis, which gets caught up in its limits apropos politics, deconstruction, for Martínez, has the ability to formulate ‘a “strong argument” for responsible actions among social subjects’ (3). It is precisely this ability of/in deconstruction to work through the socio-politico limits that Martínez deploys in her short book, spanning three chapters, a postscript, and a generous foreword by Judith Butler.
The first chapter, ‘The Economy of Alteration: Resistance and Violence’, begins with one of the basic deconstructive claims that ‘every limit is a barrier and a point of contact that at once cancels, produces, draws, and originates’ (21). Martínez takes this deconstructive claim apropos ‘limits’ and brings it to Freud’s earliest work, his 1895 Project of a Scientific Psychology, where Freud ‘considers a limit that he thinks of as a membrane’ (24), whose function is to form an ‘archive’ which is ‘at the same time’ open to being a repository of ‘ever more information’ (26). Freud, Martínez shows, does not solve this riddle of psychic resistance in favour of total receptivity or absolute resistance, but instead makes this very ‘resistance’ the ‘origin of psychic life’ (‘Origin of psyche, of memory, and of life is thus the resistance of ψ neurons’ (30)). It is here, amidst her reflections on the psychic life and its quantitative mediation between resistance and reception, that Martínez chooses to make her first political intervention. She takes the (speculative) origin of the psyche/psychic life and displaces it to read the ‘violence of borders’ (33) and the ‘question of authority’ by asking, ‘How and when do we take in the foreign, and how much foreignness do we take in?’ (34).
One might wonder whether such figurative displacements can even be undertaken in the first place. Is it even possible to draw parallels between ‘membranes’ and ‘borders’ on the one hand and ‘stimulations’ and ‘humans’ on the other? Martínez, however, doesn’t reflect on these basic yet crucial questions. Reading her text, it seems as if the only operational distinction between the psyche and the nation-state is one of scale and not of substance. Martínez responds to the question about foreigners through a deconstructive vocabulary and states that the answer to this can be neither total receptivity, for ‘differences would evaporate’ (42), nor absolute resistance, for ‘[T]he survival of singularity depends on…difference’, ‘on the call of the other, which is multiple’ (37). ‘If the nations were to function metaphorically as a psyche’, Martínez claims, ‘it would ideally be surrounded by membranes that were permeable to foreigners, rather than uncrossable borders’ (42). The resistance of membranes qua borders–resistance which, it should be noted, is ‘not blockage’, ‘not isolation’, ‘not impermeability’ (36)–is crucial because ‘without borders we cannot speak of hospitality’, and where ‘there is no resistance, there is no reception’ (43). The politically provocative and sociologically decontextualized example that Martínez evokes here is that of ‘clitoridectomy’. She explains:
It would not be desirable, under any circumstances or in any context, if clitoridectomy were permitted in any part of Mexico. How do we welcome the foreigner then? I have said unconditionally, but this is not and cannot be true. (43)
To bar entry to this strawman foreigner who blindly indulges in Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), Martínez proposes that ‘All borders should…resemble ψ neurons, that is, they should offer a certain amount of resistance’; a resistance which she goes on to add, ‘must always be much less forceful than the force that it opposes’ (ibid). Here, not much is said about the ‘quantity’ of this ‘resistance’ a nation-state should exert on refugees, and, furthermore, no mention is made of the nature of the entity that should be made responsible for exercising this state-backed resistance. It is always risky to criticize such a hypothetical scenario, for one, from the author’s perspective, it could merely be a scenario that, like any other, can only take one so far in illustrating a theoretical point, and for another, it remains, after all, a hypothetical scenario to begin with. Nevertheless, even when one is to unconditionally, i.e., ‘under all circumstances or in any context’, condemn FGM, one also has to consider the deeply reactionary overdetermination which has crystallized around the phenomenon. FGM, which in popular imagination is (mis)perceived to be a barbarous act practised and propagated only by central Africans, secretly brings through the back door a slew of dangerous dichotomies, including that of ‘barbarous-civilized’, ‘westernized-fanatical’, ‘secular-premodern’, to name a few. Thus, when Martínez makes FGM her transcendental litmus test to distinguish the ‘good’ refugees (who deserve ‘our’ hospitality) from the ‘bad’ (who must be resisted at the borders), she is both unconsciously admitting a whole series of metaphysical presuppositions about the ‘Other’ and predetermining the conditions that has to be fulfilled if the ‘Other’ to be recognized as deserving ‘our’ hospitality. It seems to me that we are far from the deconstructive work of thinking through the (metaphysical-)dichotomies and traversing the (logical-)double binds. By the time the chapter is over, it still remains unclear how exactly Martínez’s displacements between Derrida and Freud, between borders and neurons, and between community ethics and private psyche are helping us to rethink, let alone push further, the (Derridean) theme of hospitality.
Shifting the focus from membrane-borders, the second chapter, titled ‘The Economy of Sacrifice: Melancholic Elaborations’, explicates the formation as well as the functioning of the ‘social order’ while considering the ‘problem’ of ‘cruelty’ as ‘inherent in human nature and thus as an insuperable limit’ (49). The point of departure here is Freud’s Totem and Taboo, and particularly his hypothesis that i) The ‘social is born from and sustained by two prohibitions’, namely the ‘incestuous and cannibalistic’ (45), and ii) that the ‘Social contract could sustain and preserve itself only on the basis of shared guilt and democratization of sexual intercourse’ (47). Considering these Freudian speculations with which Martínez begins the chapter, one might have expected her to stay at the (abstract) level of the ‘social’. However, contrary to the expectation set up at the opening of the chapter, Martínez is quick to move from the level of the ‘social’ to that of a ‘subject’; and, in the process, makes the following three crucial observations:
- The ‘ego is… undecidable, in that we cannot render a single and verifiable decision as to whether it is singular or plural’ (51).
- ‘The subject-as-agent is also the subject-as-subjected’ (53).
- Considering that ‘origin is always a crime,’ every ego is a ‘guilty ego’ (55) and ‘is in debt’ from the very inception (56).
This charting of ‘subject’ qua ego that Martínez undertakes by moving from Freud to Butler and Althusser ends with her stitching the ‘ego’ back to the ‘social’ based on ‘the big primitive secret that we all carry within us’ (55): the secret ‘of endogenous instincts, of cannibalistic and incestuous desires’ that ‘we’, individually, keep ‘repressed [and thus] removed from the consciousness’ and of which ‘our’ civilization helps with ‘the prohibition or at least the regulation’ (57). Buried deep underneath this elaboration of the guilty ‘ego’ and the repressive work of ‘civilization’ is Martínez’s central argument that ‘Modern states’, just like Freud’s primal horde, ‘are repetitions of totemic organization’ and that ‘Every institution is the staging of an originary exclusion’ (60).
One might resist, like I surely did, this drawing of similarity between the vastly complex machine that is the contemporary modern state and the speculative horde of brothers at the originary scene/site of civilization. For one, the Freudian horde of brothers only has to deal with the question of sexual difference and is clearly not plagued by the many maladies which affect the modern ‘subjects’, including the difference/distinction between class, citizenship, race, and so on. However, for Martínez, these two scenarios (i.e., horde brothers and modern state) are nothing but two iterations of the same ‘scenes repeat[ing] themselves’, both symptoms of ‘repression’ and both like the death drive which ‘can [only] be regulated but not overcome’ (57). The name that Martínez gives to this regulation that can get ‘us’ out of the grips of the (melancholic-)death drive is mourning. This is because the path of mourning, unlike ‘circuits [that] always lead us back to the same places’ and thus result in repetition of the ‘same scenes’, would rather allow ‘for us to take other paths that are not circular, not circuits’. In place of the politics of sacrifice (think of the band of brothers) where ‘[T]he melancholic puts his or her ego to death’ at the altar of the sovereign (58), we need, Martínez argues, ‘communities of duelists [duelistas, also ‘mourners’]’ who will ‘resist sovereign power’, will ‘battle against death’s squadrons’, and will ‘manage to re-invest libido erotically, productively, and creatively’ (62-63). Membership in a horde or citizenship in a nation-state makes no difference as far as Martínez is concerned. They both are products, or better symptoms, of death drive-induced repression: a repression whose clutches, or circuits, can only be broken by converting it into winding paths of mourning.
The third and final chapter of Eros, and the longest of the three, is titled ‘Beyond the Limit of the Death Drive: Eros’ and is divided into five subsections. Martínez begins the first section, ‘Life and Death Drives’, by going back to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and picking up the thread from the previous chapter, namely that of finding a ‘theoretical foundation to sustain the possibility of going beyond the death drive’ (65). Unlike the previous chapter in which the question of resisting the squadron of death was mapped onto the framework of mourning-melancholia, Martínez brings her focus onto the ‘irruption of life drive within the psyche, an irruption that interrupts the autonomous functioning of death drive’ (69). ‘The origin of the psyche,’ Martínez notes, ‘is the organic body’s need to ward off its own alteration by the external world’, a need which ‘results in the ruling principle of psychic life…the pleasure principle’ (71). However, ironically, ‘in tending toward the total discharge of tension,’ the pleasure principle turns itself into ‘a deathly impulse’ (70) and ‘ends up merging with the death drive’ (71). Martínez elaborates how, to sustain life within this paradoxical scenario, Freud introduces a ‘principle of constancy’, which ‘reserves a certain quantity of excitation as a defense against self-exterminating discharge’ and consequently ‘defers the death drive’ (73). She reads this creation of the reserve, ‘made possible by the death drive’, as the very site of possibility which ‘facilitates the archive’s genesis’, and, subsequently, argues that ‘mediation’ (by the psyche between ‘life and death’) is ‘memory’ and is ‘writing’ (74).
This productive and promising eruption of Derridean ‘trace’, ‘archive’, and ‘writing’, within the reading of Freudian ‘psyche’ is unfortunately not further developed. Martínez soon returns to the topic of the deferral of the death drive to show how this very deferral, ‘the formation of ever more complex organizations,’ gives way to ‘Eros’ (79). Located at the other side of the death drive (and the death drive, we should not forget, is in itself the other side of the pleasure principle), ‘Eros’, Martínez notes, is the ‘force which ties all life together and the force that hyperbolically sends the organism hurtling towards an inanimate state’ (81). The thing which distinguishes Eros from the death drive, Martínez argues, is the form of its deferral, its ‘time of delay’ which makes ‘tomorrow… a place of possibility’ (83). One is reminded here of Derrida’s l’avenir, to come, and the distinction he makes between ‘l’avenir’ and ‘le future’. However, as with ‘trace’, so with ‘l’avenir’. Neither of these concepts are much further developed, and we are meant to be satisfied with only distant echoes of deconstruction.
The second section of the chapter, titled ‘Regression of Psyche and Erotic possibility,’ continues over this theme of detour of drives and goes on to argue that while ‘all drives will inevitably tend towards discharge’, it is possible for the drive to ‘change the object of discharge, and that this object need not to be one that “naturally” corresponds to drive’ (90). It is precisely this ‘renunciation’, the ‘postponement’, which not only ‘gives rise to the psyche’, but allows for the possibility of community by sacrificing ‘the immediate satisfaction of all desires’ (91). While the text does not explicitly say so, it is quite apparent that Martínez wants to read postponement in the discharge of drives and read the detours that drives take as part of this postponement, as precisely the thing which gives way to what she calls ‘erotic possibilities’.
Here, one might ask whether all prohibitions to the discharge of the drive are to be taken as productive and ‘erotic’ (97). It cannot be and Martínez is quite aware of this fact. In the third section of the chapter, titled ‘Sublimation: The Creation of New, Erotic Paths for the Drive’, Martínez goes on to argue how it is only through ‘sublimation’, which ‘involves a successful transaction within psyche’s economy’, that we can get a scenario that does not ‘result in pathologies’ (ibid). Like the ‘economy of Derridean difference’ which ‘might displace or differ death’ (98), sublimation, argues Martínez, facilitates the ‘drive’ into changing ‘both the path it takes and its objects’ (102).
According to Martínez, the failure in/of sublimation has serious consequences. She argues that one can detect the traces of this failure in the eruption of symptomatic social phenomena, such as the young people in Mexico joining gangs and drug cartels when the ‘social order has closed off…their future’ (107). While the failure of/in sublimation, for all we know, might play a major part in generating societal disturbances, including the eruption of violence, it is difficult to be convinced that the failure of sublimation is the only factor playing a significant role. For instance, considering the hugely unequal society that we all share, how are we to understand the role that class-based discrepancies play in the failure of sublimation? And, moreover, what roles are we to even expect from sublimation when living in the times of such rigid class-based social stratification? Class, however, is a term that simply doesn’t appear anywhere within Martínez’s text.
The chapter moves on to further inquiry on the theme of sublimation in the third section, titled ‘Language and Negation’. ‘Language’, Martínez notes, ‘involves discharge of drive’ that does not run ‘toward immediate action’ but rather towards ‘forms of discharge involving representation or psychic mediation’ (114). However, language, unlike psychic sublimation which enables the subject to ‘replace an external object of desire with a work of fiction’ (104), makes the subject ‘“subjected” to civilizing law’ (115). One might expect a bit more elaboration on this asymmetry between the general work of psychic sublimation and the particular work of sublimation undertaken through language. However, Martínez doesn’t take that route, and rather continues with further reflections on language that lead her to the following three major claims:
- Language is an ‘ambivalent’ system where it can be ‘an apparatus of power that subjects use and at the same time, paradoxically, lead us beyond this subjection’.
- Language ‘has a fictional structure’.
- Language is an ‘as if’, i.e., it has the structure of a fetish (119).
Beyond this, language also leads Martínez to quite an intriguing proposal that ‘the possibilities of thought and for symbolization…that are opened by culture might lead us into a realm that resembles the plant kingdom rather than that of the animal’ and that the ‘paths toward the discharge of drive resembles the image of a tree that grows into numerous branches, rather than an image of a hunting tiger running through the jungle’ (121). It is a bit disappointing that Martínez doesn’t do much with this proposal and leaves her readers wanting for details about exactly how our conceptualization might change, either in our understanding of ‘drives’ in particular or psychoanalysis in general, if we were to, as she says, give primacy to ‘botanical inheritance as homo sapiens’ (122).
Following this brief entanglement in the branches of botany, Martínez leads us, unsurprisingly, from language to negation. In allowing ‘repressed material to accede to consciousness while blocking the entry of the corresponding effect’ (126), negation, Martínez argues, ‘carves out a path for the sublimation of the death drive’ (128). It is the ‘work of the negative’ that functions like ‘play’ where ‘fantasy and desire are transfigured’ (132) (remind yourself of the famous fort-da game) and allows ‘to inscribe oneself into the social fabric…the realm of Eros’ (135).
The third chapter finally comes to a hasty closure on a ‘lighter’ note with a section titled ‘Humor and Supremacy of the Ego’ where the theme of humor is briefly taken up and is read as ‘another way of sublimating destructiveness’ (139). Contrary to ‘pathological processes’, like ‘neurosis and psychosis’, which escapes the ‘urgent demand of the world’, humor, Martínez argues, ‘does not involve the loss either of the reality principle or any ethical compass’ and, instead, is ‘liberating and elevating’ with the ‘superego’ offering ‘the ego a “yield of pleasure” by stepping away and laughing at reality’ (140-141). It is not quite clear how exactly this detour to ‘humor’ is helping Martínez to explore the broader concerns of the chapter, and it’s even more confusing when, in a single paragraph, the section on ‘humor’ shifts back to reflections on ‘erotic action’, read now as ‘an interminable task’ which is ‘not to death’ but ‘is ongoing, until death’ (142).
The sudden breaks/shifts that we see in Martínez’s inquiry into ‘humor’ and the ‘death drive’ are, however, not local, but rather are present throughout the text. In the first chapter, it is the thread of ‘hospitality’, provocatively brought into focus through the example of clitoridectomy, that is left unattended. While evoking Derrida, Martínez doesn’t elaborate at all on the displacements that happen, and which have to happen, when one reaches the door of hospitality through the frontiers not of deconstruction but psychoanalysis. In the second chapter, it is sovereignty, yet another Derridean theme, which is evoked and left unattended. Here, even if one is to accept some essential similarity between the modern state and the Freudian ‘band of brothers’, something that I am hesitant to do, it is still difficult to accept that the mechanisms and the sites of exclusion will remain the same across these two forms of sovereignty (i.e., in the horde vs. the modern state). Furthermore, this absence of engagement with the form/mode/type of political sovereignty makes it quite difficult to see how exactly the proposal to form communities of ‘duelistas’ (mourners and duelists), a proposal which lies at the center of her text, might play out when it comes to liberating the subject-ed from the death clutches of sovereignty.
It is, however, not these untied threads that hurt Eros the most. The aspect that undermines what is otherwise a highly informative and intriguing read is Martínez’s half-steps (le pas au-delà) towards deconstruction. Martínez begins Eros with a promise to inject deconstruction within the foundations of psychoanalysis so that the latter can be cured of its ‘dearth or even outright lack of…participation in the political realm’ (2). However, it seems to me that this promise is, at best, only half-fulfilled. Throughout the text, we see Martínez approaching the threshold of deconstruction but resisting taking her arguments to their logical conclusions. The theme of hospitality, which is read through the figure of psychic borders in the first chapter, is not much developed. The theme of sovereignty, particularly the relationship between the concept of ‘sovereignty’ as elaborated by Derrida and the one that appears in Freud through his speculative history of human civilization, remains largely unaddressed in the second chapter. In the third chapter, where there is a significant emphasis placed on the concept of ‘deferral’/‘delay’, a concept that lies at the very foundation of deconstruction, Martínez doesn’t have much to say about the deconstructive origins of her psychoanalytic theorization. Amongst these half-steps and sudden breaks, Eros risks obscuring what are otherwise fascinating insights into the uses of deconstruction in assisting psychoanalysis to overcome its sociopolitical limits.
One is almost tempted to read these sudden breaks in the text, including her half-step towards deconstruction, as Martínez’s attempt towards replicating at the level of textual form what was proposed as theoretical concept in the last chapter: to think with/in ‘botanical’ form, like a tree that grows into numerous branches, while exploring ‘the possibilities for thought and for symbolization’. While I am not sure if that was the intention, I would have preferred to see a few arguments that ran like ‘tigers’ in between and across the pages of Eros.
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