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Nathan, il cui atteggiamento distaccato nei confronti di Traven e degli altri pazienti evoca il
fenomeno che Ballard denomina ‘death of affect’, una forma di individualismo esasperato
caratterizzato da un distacco emotivo tendente al patologico, tipico delle società ad alto tasso
tecnologico, che trova un parallelo nel fondamentale testo di Herbert Marcuse, L’uomo a una
dimensione 28 . Lo scrittore Iain Sinclair rileva una connessione tra Bataille e Ballard, attraverso
Crash, nel rapporto tra morte e sessualità, già esplorato da Sade e Freud 29 . La coppia oppositiva
Eros/Thanatos è pertanto alla base di un testo come Crash, nel quale la pulsione di morte ha un
ruolo di primo piano, in una vicenda che si pone come sintomo di una deriva morale della società 30 .
Analogamente, secondo lo stesso schema oppositivo, in The Drowned World la pulsione di morte
finiva con il prevalere sul principio del piacere nel comportamento del protagonista, Kerans. A
comporre il quadro di esplosioni di energia dionisiaca che segnano la narrazione di Crash
concorrono le funzioni di coppie oppositive quali vita/morte e creazione/distruzione. Ricarda Vidal
aggiunge: «Crash suggests and explores a new sexuality, an alternative sexuality, which is
stimulated by the aesthetic, imaginary, and physical experience of the car crash, by the imaginary
and the real fusion of body and technology» 31 .
Qui non troviamo macchine da cucire e ombrelli. Piuttosto questi testi fanno riferimento a
Sade e Bataille per il legame tra sesso e violenza, che li qualifica in ogni caso come opere debitrici
nei confronti della poetica surrealista. In Crash questo debito è ascrivibile in particolare a Histoire
de l'oeil e L’Erotisme di Bataille, nella misura in cui erotismo e violenza si mescolano in una
28 « […] [W]hat Ballard has diagnosed as the malady of the late twentieth century – the death of affect [corsivo
dell’autrice]. Ballard coined this term in ‘Tolerances of the Human Face” (1966) to refer to the overwhelming air of
physical and emotional inertia that vitiates human consciousness. […] Ballard’s ‘death of affect’ thesis articulates clear
parallels with Herbert Marcuse’s contemporaneous study One-Dimensional Man (1964), which similarly criticised the
mechanisation of human subjectivity by modern technological systems. Language, for Ballard and Marcuse, has been
colonised by the mass-media systems, and with it all sense of agency, emotion and imagination has been replaced by
ready-made formats. In the prosthetic environment of the post-war mediascape we do nothing more than approximate
ourselves to one element or another of a pre-established dictionary. Moreover, the mechanisms of representation are so
well-concealed that perspectival space has collapsed altogether. Boundaries separating reality/representation,
internal/external, psychic/social have been eroded, flattened by the two dimensional space of the television screen.»
Jeannette Baxter, J. G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination, op. cit., p. 73.
29 «The connection between sex and death, between the ‘petit mort’ of orgasm and final annihilation has been made by
many philosophers. The Marquis de Sade was perhaps the most notorious writer on these themes. Sigmund Freud
started his work in psychoanalysis by foregrounding the sexual drives, but subsequently supplemented his thought on
sexuality with his paradigm of Thanatos, the death instinct, the second major element in the psyche. The writings of
Georges Bataille (2001) develop the connection, and bataillean themes are evidenced in the narrative and characters in
Crash and the life and work of Bob Flanagan. Ian Sinclair argues both that “[Cronenberg’s] Crash is Georges Bataille
serialised in Autosport”, and that it “is a movie de Sade would have adored” (Sinclair 1999 : 69).» Graeme Harper,
Andrew Moor, Signs of life: cinema and medicine, London-New York, Wallflower Press, 2005, p. 61.
30 «[…] by using the crash as a symbol of the fusion between destructive human desires and no less destructive
technological imperatives, which interpenetrate and exacerbate each other (with neither able to take precedence), the
text suggests that contemporary social existence is powered by the death-drive.» Andrzej Gasiorek, J. G. Ballard,
Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2005, p. 82.
31 Ricarda Vidal, “Crash-Desire - The Post-Erotic Machine Men of J. G. Ballard‘s and David Cronenberg‘s Crash”, in
Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture: The Many Returns of Futurism, unpublished thesis, London Consortium,
University of London, 2007, pp. 140-155.
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