then Peter said

Acts 2:38-

Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.

april is over

(Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale University, from “Dissection”)
image from this review of new coffee table book, Dissection

nothing to be afraid of?

"No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of. "- Walter, in The Big Lebowski

While reading (on Wikipedia) about Freud's death drive, some things come up that resonate and loop in mysterious ways, both in terms of my current and previous research, and with life in general- but I suspect this might just be the magic of psychoanalytic theory. I seem to see meaningful (and not so meaningful) connections everywhere these days... so bear with me. Also I should mention that I will write about ether soon/eventually- rather than just contemplate it inside.

Back to the Death Drive.

Also referred to as the 'death instinct', (translation issues from German apparently), the human death drive is described as "the drive towards death, destruction, and non-existence."

Freud's Pleasure Principle puts forth that the human condition is predicated upon the maximization of pleasure and the avoidance of pain (id). Its mature counterpart, his Reality Principle, is what "compels one to defer instant gratification when necessary because of the obstacles of reality" (ego). Together, these 'instincts' can embody and explain human life and self-preservation, from birth to death.

From what I can tell, Freud's theory of the death drive, this idea that there exists an uncontrollable force within being that strives "to return to a pre-organic, inanimate state" (doesn't this kind of echo a famous scientific law?- that one DM uses to preface Heterotopias?), is meant to account for human behavior that, on the surface, run counter to his two principles. For example, sadism and masochism are not easily reconciled with neither the pleasure nor reality principle- they seem to oppose the drive for pleasure and coherence. They (and other human impulses of various scales and intensities) point toward our darker side.

*Wikipedia for all of the death drive information and quotes- the page can be accessed through the first link.

Strange connection 1:
Venus in Furs (1870), novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (after whom masochism is named), is rife with fragrance and odor, richly described by submissive protagonist. The scents reflect his forbidden affair with mistress as it begins, peaks and descends. Smells form a major dimension of the story (fantasy, erotism/eroticism, memory). see p140 of Gilbert.

Strange connection 2:
I've been meaning to lead this whole archive/death drive thing elliptically (potentially through Carolyn Steedman's writing on Archive Fever- with this little bit I recall about literal illness and death from researching in archives) to a discussion of smells of decay and decomposition. Material reality/natural evolutionary intent of bad odors seem to align with our culture's desire to forget/dismiss/deny mortality and death. Possible digressions into attitudes towards death and dying, illness, funeral rites... spirituality, immortality (immortality by kundera??), which ties into memory, remembrance, looping back to smell and instinct?

Strange connection 3:
from death drive wikipedia page linked to above:
On the origins of the death drive theory: "subjects often tended to repeat or re-enact these traumatic experiences, a phenomenon that Freud called repetition compulsion."

from my M1 notes, May 22, 2007:
“a word (archive) can never be a beginning but rather is always a mark of the empty place between a thing and its representation." (Steedman, Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory, p6)

archive. Psychoanalysis
desire for origins
Freud – compulsion to repeat is the drive toward death. (end of M1 notes)

Am I driven towards death? Does this explain my fascination with archives? Also why I repeat my mistakes? (And by me, I pretty much mean all of us, everyone.)

Strange connection 4:
Lacan- Why do I have at least 3 books on my shelf on him? What originally prompted me to order them from the library? They are right next to a whole slew of books by/on Zizek... things it might have been about- perversion, voyeurism, desire, the other, the shadow- might've been during night and unconscious period? or maybe while reading up on Hejduk? all seem related somehow. privacy, trespass, boundary...

Strange connection 5:
Finally, to explain the opening image, the movie The Big Lebowski (definitely in Top 5) flashed through my mind when I first read the definition of death drive. I thought of the German nihilists first, though I see now that Freud can explain very well the motivations of The Dude and his fellow characters. I'm not sure why nihilism sprang to mind- maybe it was the "non-existence" bit... I googled nihilism and death drive and found two articles that look interesting:

Autodestruction and Nonexistence: Two Distinct Aspects of the Death Drive, (1986)
by Uri Lowental, M.D.

The Life Death Drives, (2007)
by Yazar Cengiz Erdem

The first article begins with this quotation:

"Death has two faces. One is nonbeing; the other is the terrifying material being that is the corpse. The form of nothingness — a fear that someday one ceases to be. As one grows older one pays more and more attention to the second, material side of death. Nonbeing is infinite emptiness…. It is no coincidence that all poems about death depict it as a journey, but the journey is in vain. When his ride is done, they find him in bed and bang his head on the threshold." -M. Kundera (1981)

Though it doesn't state in the citation, I have a feeling this passage is from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting... (this article confirms it! I'll double check in the book later) all I can say is, strange... Under pressure that day when we first met as a group, I chose this book to be in my top 5. I read it years ago. I don't even remember what it's about. I do remember that it made me feel both sad and hopeful, conflicted, confused... Why did its title emerge that day? I'm not sure if it'd be in my top 5 the day before or after, or if we had had a lot of time to think and assess, peruse titles and options. In any case, another strange connection.

Or maybe this just shows that my interests are too narrow and aligned, the way everything hooks up sort of neatly? Or that the realm of this thesis is too broad, if anything and everything fits in? I really need to find a way to focus/organize/ steer myself in one direction. Am I straying too far from scent?

death drive

On Monday I went to Macondo Books, this terrific used bookstore I used to go to all of the time as a teenager. I bought three books:

Envisioning Information, by Edward Tufte
(nice images - I figure one day I will deal in images again)

The Volcano Lover, by Susan Sontag
(hot eruptions? historical romance?? susan sontag??? need I imagine more?)

13 Stories & 13 Epitaphs, by William T. Vollmann
(interesting sounding author mentioned by Donald at 1st rehab, so I had my eyes out. Finding one with a first chapter entitled The Ghost of Magnetism, and a last chapter called The Grave of Lost Stories, I felt very lucky)

* * *

I started M1 in May of 2007. I was happy to be in Montreal, feeling weightless after eight months of Toronto winter and soul-killing office work. In love and seeing everything with bright eyes, I had no idea what to do for my thesis – the goal was to escape. (Yes, it’s funny that I find myself now desperately trying to escape my escape. Is this all we do, run in circles?) In class, forced to say something, anything, to my peers and professor, I improvised vague interest in doing a national archive for Vietnam, the country of my origin. It feels strange to write that – the country of my origin. But it also feels too distant to say, Vietnam, the country of my parents’ origin. One feels like a lie, or at least a fiction; and the other, a cold hard fact with no friction.

Either way, it didn’t fit. I suppose I thought that by delving into the past of this faraway country, this idea across the world, I’d kill two birds with one stone. What was it that I wanted to probe? The meaning and fallibility of origins? The strengths and weaknesses of cultural identity? What is an archive anyway, how does it work? What does it mean, to archive? What roles do memory and objects (and the memory held in objects) have in the construction of cultural history? In the construction of the self, of personal identity? How does this culture pass itself on, procreate, recreate itself generation to generation? How did this even relate to architecture? I had no clue. I won’t go into the superficial reasons why this plan fell apart. I'll just say that in the end, I was not reborn. There was no deeper connection to my amputated cultural past. (I had imagined roots surpassing myself, growing towards Vietnamese soil!) I did not finally feel whole. My parents did not love me more. And I still didn’t have a thesis, or even a passable proposition for one.

Along the way I did learn a bit (not enough) about Vietnam. It seems like a beautiful country with a completely fucked up history. But that’s sort of like describing someone as “complex,” as if that’s worth noting – aren’t we all complicated messy people with dirt in our pasts? The origins of most nations were bloody and cruel, their survival filled with death, lies, and violence. As far as recent history goes though, and of course this means history that America has had its hand in, it is a particularly interesting and devastating story. A story that I’m sure would touch anyone who knew of it, not only the children of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants.

In researching in my typical free-form, grab anything, sort of way, I came across Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. I liked the title and impressiveness of its author enough to buy the book. Archive. Fever. It was much too difficult for me to understand – I knew that. But I found its difficulty seductive and I still believe that, one day, I might be ready to tread past the Preamble.

An excerpt:
“It follows, certainly, that Freudian psychoanalysis proposes a new theory of the archive; it takes into account a topic and a death drive without which there would not in effect be any desire or any possibility for the archive. But at the same time, at once for strategic reasons and because the conditions of archivation implicate all the tensions, contradictions, or aporias we are trying to formalize here, notably those which make it into a movement of the promise and of the future no less than of recording the past, the concept of the archive must inevitably carry in itself, as does every concept, an unknowable weight. The presupposition of this weight also takes on the figures of “repression” and “suppression,” even if it cannot necessarily be reduced to these. This double presupposition leaves an imprint. It inscribes an impression in language and in discourse. The unknowable weight that imprints itself thus does not weigh only as a negative charge. It involves the history of the concept, it inflects archive desire or fever, their opening on the future, their dependency with respect to what will come, in short, all that ties knowledge and memory to the promise.” (Derrida, Archive Fever, p29)

To be continued.

trapped in a blazing house

from What to do in an Emergency