Falling in Love With Love Oedipal and Postoedipal Manifestations of Idealization, Mourning, And Erotic MasochismέΑΦThe Ghost of Masochism in the Queer Subject

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Identifying the Death of Gender—The Ghost of Masochism in the Queer

Subject
Alexander Kennedy
To cite this Article Kennedy, Alexander(2005) 'Identifying the Death of Gender—The Ghost of Masochism in the Queer
Subject', Journal of Homosexuality, 48: 2, 61 — 81
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Identifying the Death of Gender–
The Ghost of Masochism
in the Queer Subject
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Alexander Kennedy, PhD MA(HON)

University of Glasgow
ABSTRACT. This article re-assesses the theories of death, narcissism

and identification from a selection of essays by Sigmund Freud and
Jacques Lacan in order to demonstrate that gender is generated out of
masochism and the ‘death drive’ (Todestrieb). In closely reading and
amending key sections of Judith Butler’s queer theories, the author
argues against her Foucaltian claim that the queer subject is consti-
tuted in the face of a sadistic Law, which s/he is forced to eroticise
and internalise, and therefore conflate with her/his own masochism. It
is argued that the subject’s masochism is a queer attempt not to be; to
bridge the constitutional split enforced by the Lacanian idea of the as-
sumption of subjectivity through misidentification, and to become a
living mortuary for the (dead) identifications that found the subject on
his/her illusory ground through the (contingent) foreclosure of the
Other. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery
Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <docdelivery@haworthpress.com>
Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2004 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights
reserved.]
Alexander Kennedy is a freelance art historian, focussing on sex, gender, sexuality

and de-centred subjectivity in relation to the theories and methods of Art History. The
author wishes to thank the in theory group at the Department of Art History at the Uni-
versity of Glasgow for continual intellectual support and stimulation. Correspondence
may be addressed: Department of Art History, University of Glasgow, 8 University
Gardens, Hillhead, Glasgow, Scotland, UK, G12 8QH.
Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 48(2) 2004
http://www.haworthpress.com/web/JH
© 2004 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1300/J082v48n02_04 61
62 JOURNAL OF HOMOSEXUALITY
KEYWORDS. Freud, Butler, Lacan, masochism, ‘death drive,’ narcis-

sism, subjectivity, queer
In the first section of this article the significance of narcissism in the

construction of the subject and its relationship to masochism and death

(Thanatos) is discerned. The relationship between narcissism and gen-
der is explored in relation to the psychic processes of identification,
where identification will be shown to be a process of internalising the
ghostly libidinal cathexis of external (paternal) love objects.
The processes of desire and identification are analysed in section
two, and it is argued that gender formation is based on a wish not to be (a
subject). It is shown that the subject identifies in order to narcissistically
desire, and desires in order to narcissistically identify, and in the process
masochistically attacks the ego–constituted in the split between self and
(M)Other. The ‘refused identifications’ and desires that are present as
melancholic identifications/desires in the subject are then discussed.
(S/he does not not take the same sexed parent as a love object, and does
not not identify with the ‘opposite’ sexed parent, according to Butler,
therefore this refusal to mourn and let go of these cathexis leads to the
melancholic construction of gender.) The process of melancholia in
connection to gender and death is discussed in section three, with refer-
ence to aspects of Freud’s Melancholia and Mourning,1 and Butler’s
later ‘midrash’ in Gender Trouble2 and Bodies that Matter.3 Finally, the
article argues against Butler’s theory of masochism and interpretation
of Freud’s death drive in her essay The Pleasures of Repetition,4 locat-
ing death at the core of gendered subjectivity.
NARCISSUS AS THANATOS
By positing itself absolutely, by insisting entirely on its own plea-

sure, the narcissistic self ultimately becomes its own negation, and
resembles death.5
–Anastasios Gaitanidis
It is necessary to firstly explore how identification binds narcissism

to the death drive before demonstrating how gender relates to the death
drive. Lacan’s theory of the ‘mirror stage’ will be explored briefly to ex-
plicate Freud’s observations in his paper On Narcissism: An Introduc-
Alexander Kennedy 63
tion. Freud’s 1914 text will be used to explore his later development of
his theory of narcissism in Mourning and Melancholia and Beyond the
Pleasure Principle.
Freud’s paper On Narcissism introduced a new stage into the devel-
opment of the subject. Freud argues that primary narcissism comes be-
tween the initial auto-erotic stage and the subject’s first object-choice.
The subject takes him/herself to be a love-object, investing libido in the
ego, primary narcissism being directly related to ego formation. Narcis-
sism heralds the ‘birth’ of the subject; an ‘awakening’ that creates the ‘I’
necessary for perceiving and relating to an external ‘you.’ In this paper
Freud also separates ego-libido from object-libido, a project that takes
up most of the first section. What emerges is that object libido is a pre-
cipitate of ego libido: the ego becomes a reservoir for libido, a state that
eventually becomes unpleasurable which forces the subject to release li-
bido onto external objects.6
Freud investigates “organic disease . . . hypochondria and the erotic
life of the sexes”7 to explain ‘normal’ narcissism. He finds that the pain
of organic disease causes the subject to give up interest in the outside
world, to concentrate on himself (Freud’s subject is male), his pain.
Sleep is also given as an example of the withdrawal of libido from exter-
nal objects to the ego. In hypochondria the same withdrawal takes place,
the ego is cathected (invested) with libido, as is the ‘painful’ organ (a
cathexis–investment/flow–of libido similar to sexual arousal). In his
discussion of narcissism within sexual relationships, Freud finds that
homosexuality presents the “strongest reason”8 for the adoption of his
hypothesis of narcissism. ‘Anaclyctic’ or the ‘attachment’ type of ob-
ject-choice–the first manifestation of this choice being self to the
mother–is opposed to narcissistic object choice in which the self is
taken as a love object (‘self as and with the MOther’) instead of the ex-
ternal mother. This ‘confusion’ may arise out of the fact that the child’s
original sexual objects were himself and his mother. Freud makes the
subject in his model male, so as to prime the subject for normative het-
erosexuality. The female child, as sexually attached to herself and her
mother, creates a proclivity within the female subject for narcissism, a
narcissistic ‘closed system’ that Freud finds makes women more attrac-
tive to men. (This observation is of course related to the heterosexist ba-
sis of the Oedipus complex–’positive’ and ‘negative’ manifestations.)
The third and last section of Freud’s paper deals with the ‘ego ideal,’9
which becomes the object of ‘secondary narcissism.’ This ego ideal is
believed to be perfect by the subject, who uses it to ‘measure’ her/his
ego. The concept of the ego ideal is developed into the super-ego in The
Ego and the Id,10 and is based on an early identification/internalisation

of the Father. Although Freud does not mention the Father here, the ho-
mosexual investment of libido in the ego-ideal (‘self as phallic Father’)
is noted: “Large amounts of libido of an essentially homosexual kind are
drawn into the formation of the narcissistic ego ideal and find outlet and
satisfaction in maintaining it [my italics].”11 Freud concludes his paper

on narcissism by discussing the relationship between the ego ideal and
homosociality. He does not use this term, but his description of homo-
sexual libido being turned (folding) back on to the ego (ideal) does point
to this. Freud describes the ego ideal as the presence of the critical influ-
ence of parents, teachers, fellow men, and public opinion–the Law. The
repression of narcissistic libido necessary to create the ego ideal is born
out of “prohibition,”12 Freud tells us (the homosexual and incest taboos)
which forces the subject to take that which prohibits inside, through
identification. This ‘forced identification’ will also be discussed, and
Robert Samuels’ discussion of Lacan’s ‘return to Freud’ makes the rea-
sons for this identification very clear:
It is by idealising the father that the subject is able to give up nar-

cissism and its incestuous love relation with the mother. To say
that the father has the phallus means that the subject can only have
it if it identifies with the Other.13
Lacan’s exploration of narcissism in the paper The Mirror Stage

as Formative of the Function of the ‘I’ as Revealed in Psychoanalytic
Experience,14 introduces the ‘death in the mirror’ and the aggression
towards the perceived ‘I,’ and demonstrates how Narcissus and
Thanatos can be said to be bedfellows. Lacan demonstrates that the mir-
ror stage introduces identification (as méconnaissance) to the psyche of
the ‘pre-subject.’ This initial identification with what the subject per-
ceives to be the image of him/herself, unleashes aggression, the death
drive, which is projected onto this external other (as sadism and second-
ary narcissism). The relationship between the self, and (self as)
other–the imago in the mirror–exposes the wish to be whole, without
ego-other, or more correctly, exposes a wish not to be (a split subject).
This aggression is generated out of a sense of alienation, self from im-
age of self, fragmented self from the image of a Whole self. This separa-
tion from the unitary self creates rivalry, tension, aggression–‘original
aggressivity’/‘primordial masochism’ (Lacan) equivalent to primary
masochism (Freud), where the intrusion of the ego (with the mirror
stage) threatens to end narcissistic bliss.
Lacan observes that the aggressive relationship between self and

self-as-other quickly becomes aggression towards others–the evidence
of this being “the child who strikes another says that he has been
struck”15 –an aggressive-narcissistic turn. This model parallels Freud’s
amended theory of masochism and sadism as a projection of that origi-
nal state. Lacan’s paper Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis brings narcis-

sism and aggressivity even closer together, and tells us that “the notion
of aggressivity [is] a correlative of the narcissistic structure in the com-
ing-into-being of the subject.”16 We can take this to mean that the ag-
gression of the subject in the mirror stage is a manifestation of the death
drive. Lacan was aware of this relationship, blaming the ‘alienating
function of the I’ (“I” is an other) for this aggressive reaction, the pro-
jection of Freud’s death drive onto any other. Lacan develops Freud’s
idea of the split ego, stating that all subjects, as a consequence and quali-
fier of being a subject, are split: S. This split creates aggression,
self-punishment, and is an expression of the death drive. This is ex-
pressed eloquently by Lacan, again in Aggressivity and Psychoanalysis,
where he tells us that:
At every moment [the split subject] constitutes his world by his

[sic] suicide, and the psychological experience of which Freud had
the audacity to formulate, however paradoxical its expression in
biological terms, as the ‘death instinct.’17
To return to Freud, in Mourning and Melancholia, he develops his

earlier theory of narcissism, relating it to the psychic integration of the
lost object into the ego that occurs after the subject is separated (through
death, etc.) from a love object. As aforesaid, the consequences that such
a process has on the gender of the subject will be taken up later, before
this we must demonstrate how Narcissus can act as Thanatos, and now
Narcissus is the bridge between Eros and Thanatos. In doing so we dis-
cern exactly how Freud binds narcissism to death via his theory of mel-
ancholia.
Freud tells us that by not sleeping or eating, the melancholic over-
comes the life instinct (Eros), exposing the death instinct. The melan-
cholic (depressive) who has lost his/her object acts as if the loss is the
ego’s, which expresses itself as self-accusations, guilt, etc. These
self-reproaches, Freud notes, are actually aimed at the lost love object,
someone who the patient loves, or has loved or should love. This is very
similar to Freud’s earlier observations concerning primary narcissism,
where the narcissist loves what s/he is, was, wants to be or believed to
be once part of her/himself. The latter, of course, is very closely related

to the melancholic’s sense of past unity with a lost object (MOther).
Secondary narcissism, when stripped bare by melancholia, reveals that
it is that which was projected at the ‘significant other’ that returns to the
subject, the patient’s own ego. The projected image that fell on the ex-
ternal object as ego-ideal (in a narcissistic object choice), becomes the

shadow that falls back on the ego and is internalised in melancholia.18
The subject comes to a state of secondary narcissism, which corre-
sponds and is superimposed on top of original narcissism; object-libido
becomes ego-libido.
Thanatos emerges as the masochistic self-tormenting behaviour of
the melancholic where the internalised lost object becomes the object of
sadistic attack. The suicidal tendencies of the melancholic also confirm
this observation, where the ego actively seeks destruction. The narcis-
sistic monad, as Freud makes clear, is a disaster waiting to happen:
when ego-libido reaches claustrophobic levels. If we do not take an ob-
ject, if we do not love, we will fall ill.19 Narcissism then, in an extreme
case of depression, is death driven. The subject takes the ego as a bad
lost object that can and must be punished mercilessly. The narcissist
sees the external world and its object as threatening, so the internalised
object is killed for daring to threaten ‘His majesty the ego.’20 The exter-
nal world cannot be destroyed, but the internalised object from that
world can, and in this ironic process the ego destroys itself. In love and
suicide, Freud tells us, the ego is overwhelmed by the object but in radi-
cally different ways–but, the threat of death remains. (Lacan tells us
that: “Love is a form of suicide.”21)
Freud argues that melancholia acts like an open wound (in the ego), a
trauma that attracts libido from every other cathexis. This wound as
“narcissistic scar”22 is discussed in relation to the self-hating neurotic in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and is life threatening, as the melan-
cholic’s attempts at suicide demonstrate. The ego is wounded when it is
exposed as lacking, based on méconnaissance; is itself a lost object (a)
as in Lacan’s ‘mirror stage.’ This is unbearable, therefore death in the
form a narcissistic regression is sought to kill the subject and its ego, to
return to an undifferentiated state.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud argues that narcissism (li-
bido invested in the ego as ego-libido) is related to Thanatos, that “Ego
instincts . . . exercise a pressure towards death.”23 This is taken up later
in The Ego and the Id, where we are told that the ego, with its reservoir
of libido, works in opposition to Eros.24 So it is the multiple and seem-
ingly contradictory aims of the ego that help explain how narcissism can
act as a link between Eros and Thanatos. In one of Freud’s famous foot-
notes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he makes this explicit, and
distils the previous 60 pages into a paragraph, using narcissism as the
pivotal point of his argument. It can be paraphrased thus: the ego-in-
stincts are not given over totally to the death drive, the sexual aspect of
narcissism (all be it a desexualised ego-libido) are shown to be related to

the sexual/life instinct (Eros). In this extremely dense section, Freud
‘translates’ ego-instincts and sexual instincts into a new dichotomy of
ego-instinct and object-instincts, before attempting to reveal the funda-
mental opposition between the life and death instincts. But, as Marcuse
comments in Eros and Civilization: “The ultimate relation between
Eros and Thanatos remains obscure.”25 Freud does not manage it.
We must ask, specifically, what aspects of the ego-instincts are death
driven, and are these related to narcissism? The ‘two-front struggle’ of
ego-instincts–against the tyranny of the id’s pleasure principle and the
external world–reveals that the ego’s quest for self-preservation can be
lethal, as the stasis of primary narcissism demonstrates. Narcissistic li-
bido is ego-libido attempting to preserve the ego at all costs by cutting
off every other life giving libido cathexis. The dualistic positioning of
ego-instincts versus sexual instincts is brought into question here, when
aspects of secondary narcissism are seen as a sublimation of the sexual
instinct. Freud tells us that “the sexual instincts are at the outlet attached
to satisfaction of the ego-instincts,” so the boundary is blurred.
To return to Freud’s abstract of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we
can now see how the ego, as well as containing life-instincts, is still a
party to ‘destructive instincts,’ death instincts, which narcissism under-
lines. These instincts are posited as being ‘non-libidinal,’ yet the nature
or origin of these destructive non-libidinous instincts is frustratingly un-
clear, as Freud must have been aware. Even though narcissism brings
death into the subject, the specific mystery of death (and its non-
libidinal instincts) is out of Freud’s reach, yet it ironically drives him to
write about its absence. In the concluding statements of Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, the death drive is present in its absence as an inex-
pressible conclusion. We must now ask how death as the foreclosed, un-
touchable core of subjectivity, governed by these narcissistic death
instincts, relates to the sex, gender and sexuality of the subject. Freud
leaves us with an unresolved, maybe irresolvable question: if gender is
created out of the repetition of stylised acts, then do we continually re-
peat ourselves to death?
REPEATING GENDER TO DEATH
MOTHER: I can remember from age five and six him saying, “I
want to be a girl.” Then, my saying, “No, you can’t.” Then, him
saying, “Yes, I can.”26
–Richard Green
This section initially follows Judith Butler, and demonstrates that

physical and psychic repetitions create the illusion of a gendered sub-
ject. This takes the thrust of the argument into the absent core of the sub-
ject. It is argued that gender is born out of trauma, a trauma that forces
the embryonic subject to make and repeat identifications under threats
of death. These repetitions and concurrent identifications will be shown
to be attempts to regress to an ideal state of narcissism, the most narcis-
sistic state being the inert, undifferentiated ‘dead’ monad. In examining
this state, in which death is placed at the illusory heart of gender,
Lacan’s ‘Name-of-the-Father’ and Freud’s castration complex 27 are re-
ferred to; the threatening psychic myths that bring primary narcissism to
an end and instigate subjectivity and secondary narcissism. Freud’s
Mourning and Melancholia28 and Butler’s theory of The Melancholia
of Gender from her book Gender Trouble will be shown to link gender,
narcissism and death.
The decentred, queer subject that emerges performs identifications
that attempt to avoid yet are ironically driven to inevitable death. But-
ler’s interpretation of Freud’s death drive in her article The Pleasures of
Repetition is discussed, where it is suggested that the lacunae in her ar-
gument prevent her from emphasising the centrality of death in the gen-
der formation and identifications of the subject. As well as being based
on an ‘external’ (social) threat of death–do or die–identification ex-
poses the suicidal-narcissistic impulses that drive the subject from
‘within’ (unconsciously) towards extinction, petrification and there-
fore, objectification. In a selective reading of Bodies that Matter, specif-
ically drawing from the chapter entitled Phantasmatic Identifications
and the Assumption of Sex, it is argued that Butler does acknowledge the
trauma of forced gender assumption. She focuses on repetition and
identification, stating that they are attempts by the subject to regress to
an imagined state of narcissistic unity with the MOther. The theme of
death runs through her argument, but, is the suggestion that the (queer)
subject unconsciously seeks death–is masochistically constructed–too
problematic for Butler? This is understandable, as it is difficult to locate
masochism in the queer subject in an era plagued by AIDS; in a subject

who feels the constant threat of punishment and ‘symbolic death,’ and
sometimes actual physical death through homophobia. It is okay to reit-
erate glibly that the ‘author/subject is dead,’ but not to claim that the
sexuated author/subject unconsciously seeks death; ‘commits gender
suicide,’ in a sense?
Judith Butler’s article in Pleasure Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
deals with Freud’s theory of repetition put forward in Beyond the Plea-
sure Principle. Her article focuses on the repetition involved with sa-
dism and masochism, repetition that Freud argues is driven by the death
drive, and Butler argues disprove the death drive. Butler tackles the
death drive from a phenomenological position, stressing the importance
of temporal fixity and physical, experiential manifestations of this
drive. In limiting herself to such a position her interpretation of Freud’s
text, which lacks the productive ambiguity of Lacan’s writings in this
area, forces her to posit a premise that she answers in what can only be a
temporary conclusion. Her insistence on locking the subject in time
means that the death drive limps along as a theory. The unconscious
wish that fires the drive–to return to a state of inertia–cannot be reduced
to a wish to return to a time ‘before,’ a “better time.”29 This stage, as
Butler discerns, is symbolised by the image of the egoless fetus in the
womb–paradise, but it is suggested here that it is only symbolised by
this image. This ‘stage’ is an evolving fantastical psychic reality (fan-
tasy), based on an imagined state of unity with the mother, not a ‘real
event.’ Butler claims that it is time that the subject wants to negate by
wanting to return to a previous stage. It is argued here, following Lacan,
that it is to an uninhabitable position as an undifferentiated subject
(symbolic death), a subject that is not barred access to the ‘Real’ that the
subject wants to return to. This narcissistic ‘wish to return,’ is not a
wish to reverse time, but rather exposes the desire that (death) drives the
subject towards future object choices, identifications and repetitions;
that the subject imagines will lead to a state of unity. It is redundant to
talk of a wish to regress to a past time in this circumstance, (regression
is progression, in that is inevitably dragged along by unfolding time).
Butler’s formulation does not integrate the drive towards the paradise in
the future (after death); the imagined unity with love objects; the love of
death. (My position is broadly in line with Lacanian thought on time and
regression, where the linear development of the subject in ego-psychol-
ogy is rejected for a topographic explanation; time is not traversed–nar-
rative, structure, psychic repetitions and ‘overlaps’ are.)
Butler forgets (for now) the traumatic situation that forces the as-
sumption of subjectivity. The external threat of castration and death is
enough to separate the child from the MOther and bar it from the ‘Real’
by the introduction of language, which is the function of the father’s
‘No!’–according to Lacan. This may cause the subject to idealise an
imagined state before individuation, as Butler argues, but more than

this, it compels the subject to look for this state with and in others,
which is the key to desire.
We must briefly explore how Freud deals with sadism and masoch-
ism in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and then takes these theories up
later in The Economic Problem of Masochism,30 before Butler’s inver-
sion of these observations is proven to be problematic. In Beyond the
Pleasure Principle Freud rethinks his earlier theory of sadism put for-
ward in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in which he claims that
sadism is an attempt by the subject to kill the external threat, i.e., a sur-
vival mechanism, a ‘life instinct.’ In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, this
explanation is reversed–sadism is seen as a projection (through a narcis-
sistic-aggressive identification) of the masochistic death drive by the
subject onto external objects–which reveals the death drive to be at the
centre of original (or primary) sadism. But what of masochism? Freud
states that: “There might be such a thing as primary masochism
[emphasis in original],”31 before quickly moving the argument on to sex
cells. This “might” gives Butler more than enough room to argue
against Freud, and gives us enough ‘theoretical space’ to temper
Freud’s ideas with Lacan’s ideas of masochism and argue against But-
ler.32
Freud examines the relationship between the death drive and mas-
ochism four years later in The Economic Problem of Masochism,
1924, which Butler does not take on board. In this short article
(which expands many claims put forward in Beyond . . .), Freud
builds on the tentative statement he previously made concerning mas-
ochism: it is now “taken as certain”33 that primary masochism exists. To
explore this we will first of all look at Freud’s discussion of primary
masochism, which he somewhat problematically calls ‘feminine mas-
ochism’34 in this article.
Rather than opposing sadism and masochism in this paper, Freud
brings them even closer together, and goes as far as to say that they are
“identical.”35 Masochism is the libidinal ‘remainder,’ that which is left
over (the ‘excess’ of jouissance?) after the subject has externalised the
death drive in sadism. Although Freud does not mention the narcissistic
component of such a splitting of the death instinct–towards the external
world and the self as object–he is aware that this attachment to an earlier
stage of development is present (the subject “refer[s] to its earlier situa-
tion”36). As he says, this primary, female masochism is based on the
subject’s wish to be infantilised: “The masochist wants to be treated like
a helpless child . . . like a naughty child . . . [The masochist fantasises
about] being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby.”37

Primary masochism is, for Freud, a product of the subject’s narcissis-
tic wish to return to a helpless, child-like state. It is argued here that pri-
mary masochism is therefore linked to primary narcissism, and, rather
than being an expression of a fantasy to return to a (pre-)castrated state
(which Lacan would argue brings about the ‘birth’ of the subject, by
barring it from the MOther), primary masochism reveals a wish to re-
turn to an undifferentiated state, pre-subjectification/castration. This
state could be symbolised by the passive foetus in the womb, or the
newly born (pre mirror-stage, according to Lacan) child (the infant), as
Freud suggests.
After exploring the ramifications of Freud’s “ever-reversible the-
ory,”38 and creating many insightful observations in the process, Butler
also arrives at a position in which the subject is, in a sense helpless. But-
ler understands why the subject would want to return to the protection
of the womb, but rather than explaining this as a death drive, Butler sees
this as exposing the subjects plea for protection in life. Butler takes
these ‘defixiones’ (‘orders from the dead’) to the heart of her theory,
where the socially, symbolically dead are given voices. The death drive
appears to be an internalisation of an external threat (Butler’s version of
masochism), not the subject’s own wish, but enforced from without.
Butler has turned Freud’s death drive back on itself, but in the process
she creates, in a sense, another ‘universalising’ theory that does not al-
low the subject the fluid, contradictory illogical death wish. Masochism
is nothing other than an internalisation of the Other’s sadism, for Butler;
sadism is not about the immobilisation of the self but the about the “im-
mobilisation of the Other.”39 Butler, unlike Freud, does not allow the
contradictory and duplicitous aims that narcissism provides (bound to
the process of identification) when it is shown to be an extension of the
death drive/instinct. Masochism becomes a by-product of sadism, as
Freud argues in The Economic Problem of Masochism, a situation in
which pleasure and pain take place simultaneously. But, as was dis-
cussed, a sadistic urge is split between the external world and the self as
other, which is made manifest as masochism. Butler argues that Freud
does not take this jouissance into account in Beyond the Pleasure Prin-
ciple, which is true, but if Butler allows herself to dip into earlier articles
to prove her argument, we must look at Freud’s later writing’s to dis-

prove it, i.e., his discussion of ‘pleasurable pain’40 in The Economic
Problem of Masochism.
So, where does this leave the death drive in Butler’s argument? For
Butler the death drive is the internalisation of the threat of death that the
subject believes the external world to present. The point surely is, the
subject believes/wants this threat to be present, i.e., projects this from
within in order to put him/herself in process, in order to allow the gener-
ative (non-static) aspects of desire, failure and contingency within
her/his ‘psychic life.’ If the subject is not in a threatening situation (al-
though, life is lethal), its perception of threat and its sadistic reaction are
misplaced projections, demonstrating that the death drive is behind the
narcissistic ejection of this feeling of threat onto the external ‘other’
subject (similar to the model of narcissistic turgidity leading to the ex-
pulsion of libido).
There is no place in this formulation for the subject’s masochistic
jouissance, brought about by occupying the dangerous position of iden-
tifying and desiring the (Law of the) father. In this act of narcissism
(identifying and desiring), death is brought to the heart of the subject
and to the heart of gender. The death drive (as primary masochism) ex-
poses the subject’s masochistic urge to transgress the Law of the fa-
ther/phallus, and reveals the contradictory position of ‘death incarnate’
that the decentred subject can be said to inhabit. This courageous act,
however unconscious, reveals the construction of a gendered being, and
the quicksand that the decentred subject lays its foundations on.
‘BOYS BURN UP DRESSES OF BOYS’41
In Gender Trouble, written three years later, Butler’s theory yet again
‘flirts with death.’ In a subsection entitled Freud and the Melancholia of
Gender in chapter two, Butler’s sophisticated application of Freud’s
theories put forward in Mourning and Melancholia reveals many in-
sights that allow her to further destroy the foundations of gender. This
section, which lasts only eight and a half pages, is central to my theory
of gender as death driven. Before we discuss Butler’s remarkable con-
clusions–based on Freud’s idea of melancholia being based on a painful
withdrawal of libido from a desired love-object, and an internalisation
(through identification) of that object into the ego–we must explore the
omissions in her argument. The areas of Freud’s theory that she neglects
can be shown to be crucial in the destruction of the normativity of gen-

der, and both problematise and further Butler’s argument.
In Mourning and Melancholia Freud extensively explores the rela-
tionship between melancholia, sadism and masochism, a triad that But-
ler omits in Gender Trouble. Freud describes sadism as an
externalisation, a projection of the subject’s death drive (wish), an ag-

gressive-narcissistic reaction to the outside world. Freud, therefore,
treats the self-tormenting melancholic subject as masochistic, s/he has in-
ternalised the object through narcissistic identification, channelling the
de-cathexed libido to the ego: “Trends of sadism and hate which relate to
an object, and which have been turned round upon the subject’s own
self.”42 Freud links this process to the “circuitous path of self-punish-
ment,”43 which in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he names the ‘death
drive.’ Freud continues this line of enquiry in Mourning and Melancho-
lia, stating that the melancholic’s ‘psychic focus’ or drive (for want of a
better term) splits between identification (through internalisation–narcis-
sism–and masochism) and sadism, which also has a narcissistic compo-
nent, allowing the subject to hate the object s/he projects her/his death
at. Sadism, as well as being an externalisation of the death drive, ap-
pears to be an externalisation/manifestation of the subject’s fear of
death–a kind of negative narcissism (hate as negative narcissism).
Freud is also aware of this when he writes: “The analysis of melancholia
now shows that the ego can kill itself only if, owing to the return of the
object-cathexis, it can treat itself as an object.”44 The death drive is ex-
posed when the subject objectifies itself (takes the ego as an object), and
channels sadistic urges back at itself, in a narcissistic-suicidal attempt to
be undifferentiated; wholly dead.
According to Lacan, who is used here to problematise Freud a là But-
ler, an object cannot be desired until it is lost. Desire, by its nature, re-
veals a lack; desire is created from the sense of having ‘lost’ what one
believes one once ‘had.’ To say that the (heterosexual boy-child) sub-
ject loses the father as a desired object is incorrect, as the subject can
only desire the lost object, the MOther, who is lost as an object/body
that could be immediately accessed. Butler’s use of Freud’s model of
melancholia is then possibly flawed, in this respect. She believes that
the child originally desired the father (she refers to the child’s original
polymorphously perverse, bisexual state) who, when forced to identify
with him, loses this desired object. Butler does note that Freud argues
that heterosexual boy-father identification takes place without prior ob-
ject cathexis (i.e., the child’s libido was not invested in the father; the fa-
ther was not desired). But, Freud’s later addition to this observation,
that primary bisexuality ‘complicates’ gender formation, is evidence

that the child does desire the father for Butler. Butler argues, via Freud,
that the fear of castration, being feminised, stops this from going any
further in the heterosexual male child.
It would be more correct to say that the father is lost because he has
been identified with–he is dead somewhere within the ego. In this state
the father, as a lost object, is now open to desire (and attack). Freud, of
course, who believed identification and desire to be exclusive formula-
tions that could not exist simultaneously, would not agree, although his
‘rules’ of melancholia have been followed. Diana Fuss’ book Identifi-
cation Papers further illuminates this area, calling the subject “a verita-
ble cemetery of lost, abandoned, and discarded objects.”45 The father
who is identified with is a dead father, taken into the ego that acts as a
grave, a grave with a mirror at the bottom, a narcissus-pool. Identifica-
tion becomes “mummification,”46 according to Laurence Rickel, who
Fuss quotes. So, conversely, can a desired object be identified with?
Yes, this is as was demonstrated, the function of melancholia–the de-
sired object is lost (dies) and is internalised, brought inside the subject
who recreates its image in his/her ego.
Butler then uses Freud’s findings in Mourning and Melancholia to
explore the relationship between the incest taboo, the Oedipus complex,
and the castration complex. The heterosexual male subject is forced to
identify with the father, under threat of castration, and is separated from
the mother and from incestuous access to her body. This has a two-fold
effect, of denying the male subject access to the mother’s body, and re-
instating her as the ultimate object of desire, the desirable sex. In this
‘positive’ Oedipal process, the father is an object of identification,
which as I have argued could be said to make him available to desire
(Butler arrives at this conclusion via the route mentioned above). The
mother is lost as an object of identification, but gained as an object of
desire. The father’s threat of castration is a threat against male child-
to-mother and male child-to-father incest, as it prohibits the child access
to the mother, and prohibits the male child from desiring the father by
forcing the child to identify with him instead.
This fear of castration as feminisation reveals the boy-child’s initial
identification with the MOther whom he felt a part of, and his wish for
death: to be undifferentiated, not barred from the MOther. This shows
the heterosexual boy-child’s possible resistance to the forced identifica-
tion with the father; his transgressive, contradictory positioning. He
does not choose one sex (‘the sex which is one’: the father’s) or the
Other (‘the sex which is not one’: the mother’s)–this reveals the possi-
bility of ‘refusing’ castration, a refusal to be sexed equals the ‘queer’ as

pervert, the subject of the ‘negative’ oedipal position.
So, how does death fit into Butler’s formulation of the melancholic
construction of gender? As in her earlier paper The Pleasures of Repeti-
tion, death is an external threat (the father’s threat of castration), that
subjugates the subject. She does not see the masochistic death drive
playing any part in this process. But, I would argue that the death drive
is present. When the punishing, prohibiting father, who forbids the sub-
ject from desiring him is desired, the heterosexist, prohibitive law is tra-
versed and made futile, a “victory”47 over the Other (as Law and
Language). The male subject could be said to desire the father because
he believes that the father has the power to castrate, punish, kill him.
This reveals a self-perpetuating/annihilating masochistic death driven
aspect to homosexual desire.
The negative oedipal position involves the subject desiring the parent
of the same sex, and identifying with the parent of the opposite sex.
Benvenuto and Kennedy’s heterosexist exploration of Lacan’s version
of the negative Oedipus complex is compelling, only because it leads to
the ‘gender trouble’ that Butler finds at this moment of gender assump-
tion. Benvenuto and Kennedy break down the Oedipal process into
three stages: (1) The male child tries to identify with the mother’s object
of desire: the phallus. He thinks that he is the phallus that she needs,
based on the knowledge that she does not have the phallus. (2) The
‘Name-of-the-Father’ is used to separate the mother and child and acts
as a threat of symbolic castration that prohibits incest. (3) In the third
stage the father is revealed to have the phallus, which is the mother’s ob-
ject of desire. The child now either assumes his own phallus (the male
child who goes from being the phallus to having it)–or accepts symbolic
castration (the female child). The female child’s Oedipal complex is
similar to that of the male child, although she enters into this equation
believing that she has already been castrated by the mother. (The male
child leaves the Oedipus complex believing that he will be castrated if
he does not renounce his desire for his mother.) The female child redi-
rects her love for the mother onto the father, who she believes will give
her the phallus (a child through incest). It is in the second stage that
Benvenuto and Kennedy locate the possibility of homosexuality, with
the ‘failure’ of the parental function.
Benvenuto and Kennedy unwittingly describe the male homosexual
child as a seductress, who identifies with the mother because she “lays
down the law”48 (I find the ambiguity of this idea useful). By this the au-
thors mean that the mother mediates between the father and the son; the
mother speaks for a distant threatening father; the father is supposedly

sense ‘feminised’ by speaking through the mother, and the mother is
‘masculinised’ by speaking his law. This position relies on a weak
essentialist argument that does not separate sex from gender, but as was
said, the idea of the male-child identifying with the mother who ‘lays
down the law,’ lies down with the law, the law of the father, is very
queer. The male child could be said to be denying castration by symbol-
ically placating the threatening father. This allows the male homosexual
child to have and be the phallus. The child identifies with the father’s
law through the mother’s implementation and implication with that law.
S/He (the little pervert) is the mother-as-father.
The male subject is forced to identify with the father because he be-
lieves that the father threatens him with castration, death and abjection.
This symbolic threat of death is close to Lacan’s idea of the ‘symbolic
death’ of the subject–the subject without a name or place in language;
without the ‘Name-of-the-Father.’ This creates a subject that is liv-
ing-dead, whose life and desire symbolises death. This abjected
‘feminised fag,’ as Butler calls this position, this ‘sissy boy’ (‘gen-
der-nonconforming child’) that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick problematises,
eroticises the prohibitive law of the father. This corresponds with But-
ler’s idea of the masochistic subject who eroticises pain in order to over-
come it, the early Freudian position. This internalised threat is Butler’s
interpretation of Freud’s death drive. But, as before, it must be demon-
strated that that perceived threat is projected onto the threatening father
by the subject, who knows that castration is linked to death and brings
unity with the Mother through identification and the death he desires.49
In Bodies that Matter Butler further explores the formation of a
gendered subject, whose identifications and desires are made under the
threat of death, and, it is suggested here, a wish for death. Death haunts
Butler’s text, and in chapter three, entitled Phantasmatic Identifications
and the following chapter Gender Is Burning, gender and death merge
in the permeable border of the subject. Butler repeats the claims she
made in Freud and the Melancholia of Gender, pointing to prohibition,
taboo and death as the factors that control and create a sexed, gendered
subject. But, more than this, she seems to be increasingly aware of the
possible existence of internal drives/causations that lead the subject to
seek extinction. Butler asks: “But what happens if the law that deploys
the gendered figure of abject homosexuality as a threat becomes itself
an inadvertent site of eroticization?”50 We are familiar now with But-
ler’s assertion that the subject deals with an external threat by eroticis-
ing that threat,51 but, what Butler does not discuss is, what is it within
the subject that makes him/her want to, have to eroticise this threat?
Sexuality and death–the death of sexuality. What if this ‘inadvertent
eroticization’ is intentional, and not forced from the outside?
Butler is aware that all our complex desires “may”52 (similar to
Freud’s “might” concerning primary masochism) be related to our de-
sire for the lost primary object of love (the MOther), but she does not
take the next step and see that this desire is the desire for
undifferentiation, the subject’s death through unity with the ‘Real’
MOther. Primary masochism almost surfaces next in Butler’s argument
when she claims that in desiring that which is prohibited we “punish
ourselves in advance and, indeed, generate desire in and through and for
the self-punishment,”53 but the death drive is not mentioned. And, then
again, Butler discusses the “self-cruelty” implicit in the subject’s at-
tempts to create a coherent identity. But, the wish for death behind this
masochistic urge is not made clear.
The next chapter, Gender Is Burning, is centred around death, specif-
ically the death of Venus Extravaganza in Jennie Livingston’s film
Paris is Burning,54 (our subject as male seductress). Venus, Butler
tells us, is mutilated by a client who finds that she has a penis, her ‘lit-
tle secret’–an organ as Phallus that kills and whose presence causes
Venus to be killed. Butler sees Venus’ self-production as exposing the
processes that produce the subject, “a subject who repeats and mimes
the legitamating norms by which it itself has been degraded, a subject
founded in the project of mastery that compels and disrupts its own rep-
etitions.”55 To rehash Butler’s sentence reveals her original position in
The Pleasure of Repetition: the subject overcomes external threats by
erotically mastering them, but more than this, the subject is compelled,
driven to disrupt, degrade its own repetitions. Does this reveal Freud’s
death drive–Thanatos driving Venus to extinguish Eros?
In the conclusion to this chapter Butler moves away from this posi-
tion, and asserts that the normalising law prevails by forcing suicide.
So, if Venus or any subject is masochistically death driven, it is due to
the internalisation of the threatening law. Masochism is internalised sa-
dism for Butler, the opposite of Freud’s later (re)formulation. In encir-
cling Butler’s texts I have arrived at what appears to be a position of
irresolvable duality (Eros and Thanatos?). Butler’s position being, that
the law kills the subject who dares to transgress its enforced imaginary
binaries. I would argue, following (to a certain extent) Butler, that the
subject is an event that takes place in the space between binaries, and
every attempt to assume a sex, a gender, reveals not only that gender is
burning, but that the subject is burning. Her/his failed, unpleasurable
repetitions are death throws, where all identifications are petrifications.

This reveals that we want to be ‘dead like’ the thing (Freud’s das Ding)
we desire, to be the external imago/object. The aggression that the sub-
ject feels towards its image in the eternal ‘mirror stage’ is not simply sa-
distic, it is anger aimed at the split, the ego, the self. It is masochism –the
child hits the other child and cries; s/he believes that s/he is hurting
him/herself in narcissistic over identification.
Beyond the pleasure principle lies sexuality as self-shattering death,
and the graveyard of gender. Gender is the re-enactment of loss; a mel-
ancholic denial of the death of that loss. The same-sexed parent is lost as
an object of desire, and the MOther is always lost as an accessible object
of pleasure in heterosexuality. The homosexual loses access to the
MOther, and the opposite sexed parent as object of desire. Both explo-
sive binaries rely on loss and the birth of the subject through that loss. If
loss creates desire then we desire loss, or rather, to be lost. Our repeti-
tions and identifications return to this traumatic scene of separation–
these repetitions, ‘circuitous paths’ look like life, but as Freud said, life
evolved as a concept as the human evolved. The thing that the subject
desires with all his/her heart is to be no subject; at the heart of the living,
gendered subject is death.
NOTES
1. Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 11.
Translated and edited by James Strachey, (Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 59-99.
2. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble–Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(Routledge, 1990).
3. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter–On the Discursive Limits of Sex (Routledge,
1993).
4. Judith Butler’s article The Pleasures of Repetition appears in the book Pleasure
Beyond the Pleasure Principle–The Role of Affect in Motivation, Development, and
Adaptation, Edited by Robert A. Glick, and Stanley Bone, (Yale University Press,
1990), pp. 259-277.
5. Anastasios Gaitanidis, article entitled A Critical Examination of Heidegger’s
Existential-Ontological Account of Death, in The Death Drive–New Life for a Dead
Subject, Ed., Rob Weatherill (Rebus Press, London, 1999), pp. 193-206.
6. Freud, On Metapsychology, p. 78. An initial question: If this reservoir of libido
can reach unpleasurable dimensions, and must be released in order to relieve this ten-
sion, is libido itself painful/thanatoic?
7. Ibid., p. 81.
8. Ibid. 75.
9. The ‘ego ideal’ is an early term for the ‘super-ego,’ which is based on a primary
idealization and internalization of the Father. The distinction between the ‘ego ideal,’
‘ideal ego’ and ‘super ego’ can be a difficult one to make, as Freud uses all three, some-
times indiscriminately in his ‘Metapsychological’ papers. In his article On Narcissism:
An Introduction, the ‘ego ideal’ is introduced as an initial ‘measurement’ to judge the
ego. The theory of the ‘super ego’ as a guardian, or a separate aspect of the psyche that
‘watches’ the ego is also introduced here, but not yet named (p. 89), and is described as
a development of the initial fear of retribution from the parents (p. 97). A working the-
sis would be that the ‘ego ideal’ is the initial identification with the parent, and the
‘super ego’ is the judgment of that parent on the ego. Lacan argues that the ‘ego ideal’
is a form of introjection and the ‘ideal ego’ is a form of psychic projection.
10. Ibid, p. 339-341. See footnote 3 p. 89 in the essay On Narcissism in the same
text, where the super ego is described as an “evolution” of Freud’s theory of the ego
ideal. Freud also allows the process of identification and idealization that forms the
ego ideal to be both identificatory and sexual: “Idealization is possible in the sphere of
ego-libido as well as in that of object-libido. For example, the sexual overvaluation of
an object is an idealization of it.” p. 88. This dissolves the distinction between desire
and identification that creates a binary out of narcissism and masochism, a distinction
that Freud later relies on to discuss melancholia, etc.
11. Ibid., p. 90.
12. Ibid.
13. Robert Samuels, Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Routledge, New
York and London, 1993), p. 69.
14. Jaques Lacan, Écrits–A Selection, trans. by Alan Sheridan (Routledge, 1997,
London) pp 1-7.
15. Jaques Lacan, Écrits, p. 19.
16. Ibid., p. 22.
17. Ibid., p. 28.
18. Freud, On Metapsychology, p. 88 and 258.19
19. Ibid., p. 78.
20. Ibid., p. 85.
21. Jaques Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique - Book One (Norton Press, New
York and London, 1991) p. 149. Originally published as Le Seminaire 1, (Les Editions
du Seuil, Paris, 1975).
22. Freud, On Metapsychology, p. 291.
23. Ibid., p. 316.
24. Ibid., p. 386.
25. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 39.
26. Richard Green, The ‘Sissy Boy Syndrome’ and the Development of Homosexu-
ality, (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1987), p. 1.
27. The idea of castration is used here to refer to the founding of heterosexist subjec-
tivity, and locating a heterosexually primed and split (Lacan) subject in language.
28. Sigmund Freud, pp. 251-268.
29. Jean Laplanche recognises the atemporality of this ‘state’, telling us in Life and
Death in Psychoanalysis, trans Jeffrey Mehlman (The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1985), p. 72: “Primary narcissism, as a psychical reality, can only be the primal myth of
a return to the maternal breast, a scenario that Freud on occasion explicitly classifies as
one of the principal primal fantasies” [my emphasis].
30. Ibid, pp. 413-426.
31. Ibid, p. 328.
32. It is noted by James Strachey that from 1929-30 onwards Freud “turned his atten-
tion to the outward operation of the death instinct,” (Ibid., page 412) in other words, the
outward operation of masochism. See Civilization and Its Discontents, 1929, for exam-
ple. Here Freud argues that the death instinct is directed towards the self as object and
“towards the external world and comes to light as an instinct of aggressiveness and de-
struction [sadism].” And that “masochism, would be a union between destructiveness di-
rected inwards and sexuality”–masochism is an aspect of eroticism. (Ibid., p.310).
33. Ibid., p. 412.
34. Ibid., p. 415.

35. “It may be said that the death instinct which is operative in the organism–primal
sadism–is identical with masochism.” Ibid, p. 419.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., p. 416.
38. Judith Butler, The Pleasure of Repetition, in Pleasure Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, p. 268.
39. Ibid., p. 274.
40. Ibid., p. 414. “It cannot be doubted that there are pleasurable tensions and
unpleasurable relaxations of tension.”
41. Richard Green, The ‘Sissy Boy Syndrome’, p. 271.
42. Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology, p. 260.
43. Ibid., p. 311.
44. Ibid., p. 261.
45. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (Routledge, New York and London, 1995), p. 38.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., p. 49. Fink writes of the psychotic’s ‘victory over the Other’ but this victory
is shared by the homosexual, who does not comply with the castrating power of the Law.
48. Bice Benvenuto & Roger Kennedy, The Works of Jaques Lacan–An
Introduction (Free Association Books, London, 1986). p. 135
49. See for example Anita Philips discussion of Freud’s beating fantasy in her book A
Defense of Masochism (Faber and Faber, London, 1999), and Kaja Silverman’s excellent
book Male Subjectivity at the Margins (Routledge, New York and London, 1992).
50. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 97
51. See footnote 13 above. If masochism and eroticism are joined (Freud), then But-
ler’s argument is only a half-formed observation. Eroticism has an (original) masoch-
istic aspect, which is externalised by the subject onto its love/hate objects. That which
is threatening is erotic equals the erotic (by its nature as that which is external and
draws Eros/libido away from the ego) is threatening.
52. Ibid. “It may be that we desire most strongly where . . . a substitution engages a
fantasy of recovering a primary object of love lost–and produced–through prohibi-
tion.” I argue that that ‘primary object’ is the unity with the imagined MOther.
53. Ibid., p. 100
54. Paris is Burning, a film by Jennie Livingston, 1990 (USA).
55. Ibid., p. 131.
REFERENCES
Benvenuto, B & Kennedy, R. (1986). The Works of Jaques Lacan–An Introduction.
London: Free Association Books.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble–Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London
and New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1990) The Pleasures of Repetition. In Pleasure Beyond the Pleasure Princi-
ple–The Role of Affect in Motivation, Development, and Adaptation, Robert A.
Glick, and Stanley Bone, (Eds). Yale University Press.
Butler, J. (1992). Bodies That Matter–On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London and
New York: Routledge.
Freud, S. (1991). On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 11. James
Strachey (Ed. And Trans). London and New York: Penguin Books.
Fuss, D.(1995). Identification Papers. London and New York: Routledge.
Gaitanidis, A. (1999). A Critical Examination of Heidegger’s Existential-Ontological
Account of Death. In The Death Drive–New Life for a Dead Subject. Rob
Weatherill (Ed). London: Rebus Press,1999.
Green, R. (1987). The ‘Sissy Boy Syndrome’ and the Development of Homosexuality,
New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Laplanche, J. (1985). Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Jeffrey Mehlman (Trans). Bal-
timore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lacan, J. (1997). Écrits–A Selection . . Alan Sheridan Trans. London and New York:
Routledge.
Lacan, J. (1991). Freud’s Papers on Technique–Book One. New York and London:
Norton Press.
Livingston. J. (1990). Paris is Burning, Film. USA.
Marcusse, (1969). Eros and Civilization. London: Taylor and Francis Books Ltd.
Philips, A. (1999). A Defense of Masochism. London: Faber and Faber.
Samuels, R. (1993). Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. London New York and:
Routledge.
Silverman, K. (1992). Male Subjectivity at the Margins. London and New York:
Routledge.

Falling in Love With Love Oedipal and Postoedipal Manifestations of Idealization, Mourning, And Erotic MasochismέΑΦThe Ghost of Masochism in the Queer Subject

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Identifying the Death of Gender—The Ghost of Masochism in the Queer

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Alexander Kennedy, PhD MA(HON)

ABSTRACT. This article re-assesses the theories of death, narcissism

Alexander Kennedy is a freelance art historian, focussing on sex, gender, sexuality

KEYWORDS. Freud, Butler, Lacan, masochism, ‘death drive,’ narcis-

In the first section of this article the significance of narcissism in the

construction of the subject and its relationship to masochism and death

By positing itself absolutely, by insisting entirely on its own plea-

It is necessary to firstly explore how identification binds narcissism

Ego and the Id,10 and is based on an early identification/internalisation

satisfaction in maintaining it [my italics].”11 Freud concludes his paper

It is by idealising the father that the subject is able to give up nar-

Lacan’s exploration of narcissism in the paper The Mirror Stage

Lacan observes that the aggressive relationship between self and

nal state. Lacan’s paper Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis brings narcis-

At every moment [the split subject] constitutes his world by his

To return to Freud, in Mourning and Melancholia, he develops his

be once part of her/himself. The latter, of course, is very closely related

ternal object as ego-ideal (in a narcissistic object choice), becomes the

narcissism (all be it a desexualised ego-libido) are shown to be related to

REPEATING GENDER TO DEATH

This section initially follows Judith Butler, and demonstrates that

masochism in the queer subject in an era plagued by AIDS; in a subject

imagined state before individuation, as Butler argues, but more than

about] being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby.”37

to prove her argument, we must look at Freud’s later writing’s to dis-

‘BOYS BURN UP DRESSES OF BOYS’41

can be shown to be crucial in the destruction of the normativity of gen-

externalisation, a projection of the subject’s death drive (wish), an ag-

that primary bisexuality ‘complicates’ gender formation, is evidence

bility of ‘refusing’ castration, a refusal to be sexed equals the ‘queer’ as

mother speaks for a distant threatening father; the father is supposedly

repetitions are death throws, where all identifications are petrifications.

34. Ibid., p. 415.

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