Body of the Drives, Bodies in Politics: Anonymous or Impersonal?

Is there a fear of materiality within the field of psychoanalysis? The response to this question does not distinguish among doctrines. We are familiar with the critique of the Freudian energetic theory by Lacan who preferred to speak of the drive “circuit” and of the drive as a montage in a surrealist collage. Freud (1939/1964) invokes volcanoes; Lacan interprets the Drang, the drive's constant thrust, as the outline of a circuit that turns around the object and returns to the body, rendering this source erogenous by the constant return of the circuit. “Constancy of thrust” refers to the relative stability of the circuit. It is again a question of a materiality, but a materiality of surface. Lacan also says that a human subject is constituted by the life of her drives that aim at satisfaction. He adds only that the whole question is to know how this goal is realized; there are some satisfactions that are more costly than others.

When we insist like Freud does on a supposed dualism of the components of the drive, a representative aspect and a “quantum of affect,” we do not escape the aporia of the psychic and the somatic. When we insist like Lacan does on the fact that what links the one to the other is the lack internal to the signifying chain (in which “a signifier is what represents a subject to another signifier”), with the lack internal to the series of drives, we believe ourselves to have explained how the body articulates itself with language, whereas we haven't explained anything at all: it is not because the two heterogeneous series each carry a void that their heterogeneity dissolves! Lacan, moreover, often finishes by speaking about the “enigmatic affinity” of human sexuality, biology and desire with the order of the signifiers. Why change it all if only to finish on the impotence of thought?

When we try to define the materiality of the unconscious by the body alone, or by drives independen