Perversion the Social Relation

Contamination's Germinations 203invigoration, connection, and change. But rather curiously Freud speaksof germ cells exhibiting narcissistic behavior in their conjugation: "Thegerm-cells themselves would behave in a completely narcissistic fashion."28 Why put this behavior in terms of narcissism?If germs cells can be narcissistic, rather than seek to consider the prosopopoeicimplications of this, let us think rather of the complicationsfor individualism this raises, and the consequences for understandingnarcissism—and drive, particle, agency—from a nonindividualistic vantage.The formulation of narcissistic germ cells emphasizes the direction, or libidinal aim of the energetic investment; narcissistic libido is not directedat other objects, but is turned toward the self. Freud claims toderive the "narcissistic libido of the ego from the stores of libido bymeans of which the cells of the soma are attached to one another." 25 Soit is striking that narcissism, which would seem to isolate a cell fromothers because its libidinal focus would be on itself, is bound up with adrive that foments connection, conjugation. Such terms are as remarkablycontradictory as Freud's torqued use of the non-synonyms "organicelasticity" and "inertia" in his formulation of the death drive. Wouldn'tnarcissism be more what one would expect from the death drive, a staticfocus on the self, a seeking to return to a prior state, to restore the lostwholeness of an earlier conception of self—not a reaching out to combinewith or connect to others, seeking change?If White Noise presents a textbook case of the death drive, Accidentillustrates this interconnected view of the life drive, depicting it throughthe siblings. The connection between the narrator and her brother goesbeyond language. The link she projects early on, when she imagines himslipping away and chastises him for "going against the agreement," orher sudden burst into the "Ode to Joy" at 1145 P.M., which she later corroborateswith him: "I decided to ask you later, brother, just when youactually awoke from the anaesthetic that day which will have become thepast. 1:45? you will say." 30 These moments of connection beyond languagerely on time for their corroboration, but though they are harnessedwithin the confines of this rational paradigm, they push us beyond thetemporal principle. The uncanny coincidences, moreover, evoke a senseof mysterious and impossible connections, as if the siblings are indeedlinked through sharing the same germ-plasm. They reinscribe preciselythat convergence of the automaton that Copjec values in Lacan and Aris-