Perversion the Social Relation

202 E. L. McCallumwell as space of the narrative. Overcoming the gap between the time ofnarrating and the time narrated perverts the life drive.The future perfect tense in this passage denies the perfection of thefuture—compromised as it is by contamination—and binds us to theparticularity of a moment, an impossible present, just as the death drive'srepetition compulsion seeks to bind to the instance in the past. In thatsense we might understand this drive as one toward a coalescence intime rather than space. Freud indicates that one contrast between the instinctsis that thanatos seeks to discharge a tension—seeking quiescence,reducing—whereas eros strives to heighten a tension in order to "live itoff," 2 * but the future perfect muddies this distinction. The future perfecthere serves to raise the bar, to heighten tension (Why can't she writeabout it in the present tense? Isn't she writing now, according to ourconventions of narrative?), and to promise that moment of discharge,that one day things will return to their prior state of existence, to stasis(Certainly she will have written, since we hold the book). But can wenot seek to bind to a future event, work to bind or return to a state thatwill be? Is that the drive of narrative? Why can't this narrator simply tellus about this day in the past, then, if she cannot write about it in thepresent?It is precisely because of this verb-tense tension that Accident thusseems to work against the scheme of the drives that so easily fits WhiteNoise. Wolf's narrative, which has already projected its conclusion fromthe outset, might seem to be the anti-example of the drive toward resolution.Nor does Wolf's narrative so neatly exemplify the drive towardthings and affiliations German, because it is already in Germany—unless,of course, we see its Teutonophilia as a form of narcissism. But Accidentraises the question of how viewing the drive as a coalescence in timechanges our presuppositions of what the life drive means, particularlywhen we return to Freud's idea of the ego as precipitate of abandonedego-cathexes. Is that not a coalescence in time?Let us recall that in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud takes the exampleof unicellular organisms to elucidate his theory of the life drive,or eros, as the life preserving and rejuvenating effect of temporary coalescence.27 Remember, too, that our first mention of the life drive, fromEgo and the Id, also formulated it in terms of particles. Instead of seekingquiescence or the return to a previous state, the life drive seeks re-