Perversion the Social Relation

Contamination's Germinations 205Accident demarcates the traces of the life drive's combinatory intriguesand favors a dissolution of the boundaries between self and other thatairborne toxic events similarly give the lie to on a national scale. The textis punctuated by reports on the radio—itself no less a diffusive mediumthan the radioactive cloud, functioning just as much to bond, conjugate,transform. If the radio is an obvious parallel to the radioactive cloudbothsharing the first five letters, both particles of sound or matter operatingin a combination of diffusion and focused coalescence—the textalso features a less obvious parallel in the telephone calls that pepper thetext. The telephone particle-izes: it restricts the sound traveling betweentwo specific parties, caller and receiver, to a narrow bandwidth of information;it interrupts the flow of the narrative or of life; it invades withoutseeming invasive. Both the radio and the telephone, as the mirror of thecontamination drive of the invisible cloud, offer us the difference of discourse,but more importandy narration. Through the telephone calls, thenarrator can bring us the ongoing story of the brother's surgery; throughthe radio the narrator brings us the representation of the contamination.Insofar as both communications technologies serve as language vectors,they function to contaminate, to disperse meaning across the boundariesof individuals spatially separated from one another.Joan Copjec has claimed that "it is the real that unites the psychical tothe social, that this relation is ruled by the death drive." 31 If she's right,what does this mean for perversion? And how might this affect our readingof contamination, which, if I may conflate the psychoanalytical withthe colloquial, could not be more real. Copjec's argument emphasizesthe linchpin role of the death drive—but what does it mean to rule therelation between the psychical and the social? Here's where my crackpotnotion of Teutonophilia comes in. I was obviously glib when I positedabove that the radioactive cloud, the airborne toxic event, was Teutonophilic;certainly the affinity for things German is a convenient paradigmfor an instinct to bond that models a nonhuman agency or subjectivity.And the claim that we understand Teutonophilia not as a drive to be Germanbut to be a germ passed perhaps too quickly as well; it illustrates thefragmentation, particle-ization of dispersion at the expense of calling attentionto the transformative effects of germs. But what Teutonophiliain these texts indicates is the drive to disperse change through language,and this is in some ways inherent in the drive to narrate.