those elements of the death drive which are lacking in cinema, and the reverse appears to also be true, with the cinema fulfilling the finality of a drive to death, lacking in the gif. Without a final destination, the presence of the death drive in the gif therefore takes on something of a status. Rather than being driven by a destructive impulse, the gif is that impulse, exemplary and infinite.
Having invoked Freud’s death drive we can see how a pathological sense of the compulsion to repeat exists in the gif. But before we consign the gif purely to darkness, it is relevant to cite the writer Robert Rogers, in order to locate a sense of the more positive connotations to repetition that Freud himself describes:
In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud mentions children’s natural desire for the repetition of pleasurable experiences. In his book on jokes he calls attention to the function of repetition in play: that of practicing [sic] newly developed capacities, an idea echoed when in the fort-da anecdote, Freud discusses repetition through play as a way of mastering anxiety. Also in the book on jokes Freud mentions the contribution repetition makes to comedy and the way comic situations precipitate a repetition or re-discovery and hence a catharsis – of negative self-images101
Thus the compulsion to repeat effected by the gif corresponds as much to Freud’s sensational death drive, as it does to the blind, unedited joy described by Nietzsche in 1885, that wants nothing more than itself; eternally:
101
Rogers, ‘Freud and the Semiotics of Repetition’, p.581.
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