12
In/Form–Haemo
Aesthetics and Politics
Alex. F Brown
13
Alex. F Brown
Disenchantment, Drive and Drive
Nicholas Winding Refn’s 2011 film Drive contains a short but indelible sequence in which the relations of desire and death-drive, Eros and Thanatos, appear in perfect simultaneity and indissociability. The nameless hero (henceforth “Driver”) and the woman he loves (Irene) stand in a hallway. An elevator opens, a man stands inside. The protagonists get in and the elevator closes and begins to descend. A gun is glimpsed in the coat pocket of the stranger, revealing his purpose here as an assassin sent to kill them. The hero turns and — gingerly, for the first and only time — kisses Irene. Time is stretched to dilate the brevity of the moment. In what is very nearly a single movement or perhaps a hybrid gesture, the hero pivots from the kiss to grab the back of the hit-man’s head and smash it brutally against the elevator wall multiple times. The man goes down and Driver keeps up the assault with ruthless stomping blows to the head until the man is clearly dead, and then beyond any possible rationality continues to demolish, flatten and splatter him across the rear corner of the elevator floor. Irene backs toward the door, and then through it as the elevator arrives at the bottom level. Driver looks up from the carnage he’s left and locks gazes with Irene as the door slides shut between them forever. Tenderness and violence, crystalline clarity of desire and the blind automatism of destructive rage — this constellation has perhaps never been given as concise an articulation. What I wish to do here is examine the basic terms of this libidinal economy with a special focus on disenchantment and death-drive in the work of Bernard Stiegler. What I particularly wish to work against is the notion that Eros and Thanatos are opposed tendencies, which results in a very Manichaean portrait whereby psychical life is reduced to a kind of eternal struggle between proverbial angels and demons, or creative and destructive instincts. Eros and Thanatos are best understood, on my account, as a unitary principle with two poles. Death-drive, in contrast, has no manifestation whereby it can be read legibly as an instinctual tendency. It needs to be retained, however, as the necessary condition which supports the “life instincts.” I will make my argument with an analysis of Stigler’s theorization of political economy followed by several passes through the film Drive, which I read as an exposition of the psychoanalytic concept of death-drive. My reading ultimately depends on the interpretation that the central figure of Driver is not a character in the film. On the contrary, he is its fundamental fantasy. In short, Driver does not exist. He is what has to be there in order to grant consistency to the other elements (characters, beliefs) so that a simple situation can be elevated to a story. In other words, the Driver ex-sists in relation to the film as the figure of its narrative drive. Driver is the element which weaves together a disenchanted social mileu characterized by the blanched and
Disenchantment, Drive and Drive