Perversion the Social Relation

i£oE. L. McCallumwife Babette—is going to die first, with the Dylar experimental drug thatsupposedly assuages the fear of death, or even with his choice of objectof study, Hitler. This thanatos drive is, as Freud tells us in Beyond thePleasure Principle, a drive toward stasis, or as Peter Brooks reinscribesit in "Freud's Masterplots," a drive toward the completion of the narrative.This drive is connected to repetition, which Brooks, in his readingof Freud, posits harnesses energy in the service of mastery: "Repetitionworks as a process of binding toward the creation of an energeticconstant-state situation which will permit the emergence of mastery andthe possibility of postponement." 4 In other words, repetition offers thepromise of control, management, and thus implies a sort of agency.And while the very last word of the novel is "dead"—and thus rendersthe novel a most fitting example of Brooks's claim that the death drivein narrative aims toward the conclusion—I do not offer White Noisehere to posit it as a textbook manifestation of drive theory, but insteadfor the illusions of individuality and the complications of drive theorythat the novel sketches. Its comparison to Accident, moreover, illustratesthe limitations of both control and the model of individual subjectivity.But first, let us consider the underlying theoretical model, as elucidatedin Freud.In both Beyond the Pleasure Principle and The Ego and the Id, Freuddefines two types of instincts: the death drive and the life drive. The lifedrive or sexual instinct "by bringing about a more far-reaching combinationof the particles into which living substance is dispersed, aims atcomplicating life and at the same time, of course, preserving it," 5 whilethe death instinct is, as I mentioned already, a drive towards stasis, "thatis, it is a kind of organic elasticity or, to put it another way, an expressionof the inertia inherent in organic life." 6 Joan Copjec has alreadyremarked on this curious articulation of the death drive by Freud, notinghow contradictory it is to reconcile "organic elasticity" and "inertia" assynonyms (a point Freud himself addresses in the next sentence, if onlyimplicitly, by commenting on how "strange" it is to think of instinctsas conservative rather than "impelling towards change"). Leaving asidethe remarkable appearance of "particles" in Freud's definition of the lifedrive, what I find striking about Freud's formulation of thanatos, here,is its presentation as repetition; the "that is" and "or, to put it anotherway" signal even out of context that the passage reiterates—twice—an