Perversion the Social Relation

204 E. L. McCallumtotle. What is important here, however, is that in contrast to the deathdrive, the life drive is that principle that exceeds language; we mightposit that it is the "beyond" of the Teutonophilic principle. Coincidenceonly operates within a field of dispersion. :Yet, just as White Noise's apparent delineation of the death drive isnot so direct after all, Accident is not a straightforward text. And whatwould seem to be most deadly on the thematic level—a cloud of radioactivitymoving across the countryside, contaminating as it goes—turnsout, on further analysis, to be more closely connected to the text's delineationof the life drive: the cloud's drive to merge with the greens,the milk, the fats stored in the body of the German in 198e. The narrative'scomplications drive us to understand how contamination instigatesa reversal of our notions of thanatos and eros. Although we aremore likely to associate contamination with death, not love or life, thisday's news suggests that the binding force of particle seeking particle,the discharge of a toxic cloud, might be more deeply embedded in oureros than language or narrative will countenance. It might leave us withanother, more familiar but perverted Freudian question: What does contaminationwant?Contamination inevitably bodes change, and the response to contaminationarguably incites the death drive, the attempt to resolve thedisruption and return to a previous equilibrium; paradoxically, then,contamination would be opposed to the death drive. Moreover, sincecontamination's change is independent of human intentionality—contaminationmay be an accident, or an inadvertent side effect of betterliving through chemistry—it offers a compelling figureof a nonindividualizedagency. The particles of contamination are driven by that force ofcontamination to transform, not to end or to rejuvenate. Shifting fromindividuals to particles presents a model for examining perversion thatdoes not rely on the subject for its basis, but on the systems and forcesin which subjects are constructed and embedded, the very systems thateither guarantee or disrupt the subject's coherence. Undergirding thisdrive of transformation, which works upon both the death drive and thelife drive, is a paradigm of life as pixelated, the various particles seekingto bind—but in what combinations? what manner? what ways?—andour sense of self, agency, and mastery only pieced together like a viewof a Seurat painting from afar.