Perversion the Social Relation

198 E. L. McCallumindividualist paradigm of the drive and its links to repetition and thesymbolic.Lacan describes cause as having "something anti-conceptual, somethingindefinite," 15 a point that Joan Copjec picks up in relation to thedeath drive. Although her reading hinges more on Lacan's than, as myfocus has been, exclusively on Freud's views of the drive, her emphasison the fragment, fraction, part—signaled in her very title, "CuttingUp"—renders her considerations of the drive and the role of failure relevanthere. For Copjec's reading of cause unites Lacan's with mid-centuryphilosophical views of causality that link it to failure rather than succession,conjunction, or sequence. On this reading, cause comes to be seenas perverse—a deviation from normal circumstances. If a firebreaks out,as it did in the Chernobyl reactor, its immediate cause is not the oxygenthat is nonetheless necessary for the fire to exist. Cause also linksto narrative through this juncture of deviance and the death drive, foras Brooks notes, "Deviance is the very condition for life to be narratable";16 any adherence to normal circumstances, any lack of failure, isnot narrative.Copjec claims that Lacan's reading goes beyond H. L. A. Hart's andA. Honoré's, in Causality and the Law, to place cause at the level of themateriality of language, not at the level of a subject's conscious intentionality.Indeed, Copjec concludes that "the cause which must necessarilyexist is never present in the field of consciousness that it effects," 17which is precisely why her account goes by way of the drive, as the forcesthat organize outside the conscious field. For her, the drive—and specificallythe death drive—governs the relation between the psychic andthe social. The link is linguistic: in Lacan's view the death drive prevailsover the signifying chain, or as he calls it, automaton, because semioticmeaning happens regardless of human intention. Copjec points outthat this is the same term Aristotle uses to describe coincidence, whatoccurs "as a result of a collision of separate events." 18 Since automatonconcerns how language produces effects independently of intention, automatonpresents a paradigm of nonhuman agency, and this chain is bothsocial and incomplete. The death drive, which Copjec conflates withthe reality principle, intervenes to delay: The reality principle "maintainsdesire beyond the threats of extinction presented by satisfaction.The death drive does not negate the pleasure principle, it extends it." 19