Perversion the Social Relation

Contamination's Germinations 191earlier definition. Brooks makes it clear that the issue of repetition isvery much bound up in the symbolic register: "Repetition is a symbolicenactment referring back to unconscious determinants, progressive inthat it belongs to the forward thrust of desire, and is known by way ofdesire's workings in the signifying chain, but regressive in its points ofreference." 7 Brooks plays a bit fast and loose with "desire" and "drive,"but his focus on the role of "textual energetics" throughout Reading forthe Plot is instructive, and the point here is that Freud's account of repetitionleads him to the proposition of the death instinct as an urge torestore a prior state of existence.Taking things to the symbolic level, and given Freud's insistence onthe stasis of the death drive, it might seem odd to link thanatos to narrative,which is fundamentally about transformation, succession, progressrather than stasis or equilibrium. Indeed, Brooks himself has to balancethe role of the death drive in narrative—working toward the end, bindingthe text's freely mobile energy to the conclusion and its quiescence—with the plot's necessary deferral of the end. The story goes somethinglike this: "Narratable existence is stimulated into a condition of narratabifety,to enter a state of deviance and detour . .. before returning tothe quiescence of nonnarratable existence." 8 But this account rendersnarrative as the drive to the nonnarratable, without accounting for howtransformation might occur, or differences in the nonnarratable itself.Poetic forms like the villanelle or the pantoum that hinge on repetitionare, in fact, construed to be anti-narrative, and would thus seem morelikely sites of expression of the death drive in discourse. Part of the issue,however, is the very division of the drive into two forms; Lacan willlater posit in his reading of Freud that there is only one drive, but thelimits of Brooks's reading suggest that there might be something moreat stake in drive theory than the life drive's combinatory powers andthe death drive's quiescence. Like the contradictions of the drive, narrativeinvolves the tension between telos and deferral, between closureand divagation.Although I am not the first to link the drives to narrative, I want toconsider how these narratives render contamination as itself a symptomof a different, possibly even perverse, drive, veering off course fromeither coalescence or stasis. To do so requires that we parcel out the driveeven further, provisionally positing yet another form of instinct. This